“A Dream of the Future”: Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville International Expositions, 1895-

1897

by

Nathan Charles Arthur Cardon

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

History University of Toronto

© Copyright by Nathan Cardon 2014

ii

“A Dream of the Future”

Race, Empire, and Modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville

International Expositions, 1895-1897

Nathan Charles Arthur Cardon

Doctor of Philosophy

History University of Toronto

2014

Abstract For a region often viewed as outside the processes of modernization, the United States

South’s international expositions were symbolic opportunities to demonstrate its embrace of a

narrative of industrial, cultural, and racial progress. Taking the 1895 Atlanta Cotton States and

International Exposition and the 1897 Nashville Tennessee Centennial Exposition as an

analytical basis, this dissertation investigates how southerners transformed modernity by making

it “Jim Crow.” It explores the ways white and African American southerners performed a variety

of racialized and classed identities that embraced and critiqued modern progress. Responding to

the dissolution of old certainties, southerners turned to science and technology as a stable site of

truth and meaning. At the same time, their response to modernity was rooted in the South and its

developing “New South” cities. In these cities southerners formulated a distinctive modernity

that was compatible with the region’s racial dynamics and was adopted by the North as the

nation expanded and encountered non-white colonial subjects. This dissertation makes clear the

ways in which southerners, often considered on the periphery of change, responded to

dislocating events by rooting their responses in the local. The specific economic, social, racial,

and political realities of the South all shaped southerners reactions to and articulations of

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modernity and empire. By narrowing the question of southern modernity to a specific time and

space this dissertation redefines a key moment in southern and American history, showing how

responses to the dislocating effects of modernity were grounded in the specific temporal and

spatial contexts of the South and were exported as American empire.

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Acknowledgments

Like any project that covers six years of one’s life there are many people, places, and

institutions to thank. On the research front, grants from the School of Graduate Studies,

Department of History, and Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of

Toronto allowed me to spend my summers sweating, eating BBQ, and researching in places like

Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and Washington, D.C. An Ontario Graduate Scholarship

and a yearlong fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute gave me the opportunity to take a

break from teaching and concentrate on finishing my dissertation. My year spent at the JHI was

filled with pleasant and intellectually stimulating conversations on that year’s theme of “location

/ dislocation” along with copious amounts of espresso. I, perhaps, will never have as nice an

office.

This project would not have been possible without the generous staff of archives and

libraries across the United States and Canada. I would like to thank the staff at Fisk University,

the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, the Manuscripts and Rare Book

Library at Emory University, the Smithsonian National Museum of American History Library,

the South Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, the Nashville

Public Library, the Tennessee State Library and Archives, and Robarts Library at the University

of Toronto. A special shout out is deserved for the staff of Trinity College Library at the

University of Toronto who put up with my daily appearance for a good part of a decade.

Numerous scholars lent me insights that vastly improved this dissertation. At the

University of Toronto I would like to thank Elspeth Brown, Russ Kazal, Jens Hanssen, Thomas

Lahusen, Carol Chin, Pamela Klassen, and Eric Jennings. Thank you to my external reader, W.

Fitzhugh Brundage, whose critiques will make this a better manuscript one day. To my “fourth”

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committee member, Davarian Baldwin at Trinity College, Hartford your insights and willingness

to invest in me has been a wonderful boost to my scholarship and confidence, thank you.

I want to thank my advisor Rick Halpern for plucking me out of the undergraduate

wilderness and suggesting that I may have a future in the Academy. His constant support—

emotional, intellectual, and financial—has allowed me to pursue my academic goals. On my

committee, Dan Bender provided a voice of constructive criticism. If it were not for his insights

and his desire to push me intellectually this project would have suffered. Michael Wayne is a

true mentor for someone who wishes to be a well-rounded academic. Our conversations and my

time spent working for him deeply influenced my thinking on race in America.

A central part of getting through graduate school is to have a diverse group of friends

both within and outside the program. To the Americanists at the University of Toronto, Ian

Rocksborough-Smith, Camille Begin, Paul Lawrie, Nancy Catton, Benjamin Pottruff, Brandon

King, and Holly Karibo, a big thank you for motivating me in this project through

encouragement and explication. My friends outside of the program who lived real lives and got

real careers also deserve mention as they convinced me to never take myself too seriously and

reminded me there was a life outside the university. Thank you to T. Lowell Heppner and Taryn

Diamond, Andrew Moore, the Calgary Crew, and Ben Porter and Laura Zijeck plus little Lenka.

Special mention to Steven Tam, Samuel Schacar, and Sina Akbari for introducing me to the

pleasures of life on two wheels.

This project would not have been possible without the help of my family. My maternal

grandparents, Lydia and Arthur Kublick, believed in me from the start. My in-laws, Lois and

David Butler, never questioned, to me at least, their daughter’s decision to marry an academic.

My brother Aaron, outgoing and gregarious (the opposite of me, really), was in so many ways

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supportive. To my parents, thank you for the love across the years. Over many a conversation in

the car trips to and from hockey, my father, Norm Cardon, instilled in me a confidence to express

my thoughts and opinions. My mother, Cheryl Cardon, gave me a love of reading from an early

age and encouraged an inquisitive and, at times, over-imaginative mind. This dissertation is

dedicated to them.

Lastly, to my wife, partner, and co-conspirator, Laura Ann Butler, you have been an

editor, a confidant, a lover, and a friend when I needed one the most. I really can’t imagine my

life without you. I am excited for our next chapter together.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION   1  

CHAPTER  1.  “A  PROPHECY  OF  OUR  GLORY  AND  POWER  IN  THE  FUTURE”:  THE  NEW  SOUTH  VISION  OF  THE  ATLANTA  AND  NASHVILLE  EXPOSITIONS   32  

CHAPTER  2.  “WE  SHOULD  SHOW  THEM  WHAT  A  SEPARATE  PEOPLE  CAN  DO”:  THE  SOUTH’S  NEW  NEGROES  AND  AFRICAN  AMERICAN  VISIONS  OF  PROGRESS   81  

CHAPTER  3.  NEW  WOMEN,  NEW  SOUTH:  FEMININITY  AND  WOMANHOOD  AT  THE  EXPOSITIONS   142  

CHAPTER  4.  “FROM  PITIFUL  RESOURCES  A  GREAT  AND  EXPANDING  EMPIRE”:  THE  EXPOSITIONS  AND  THE  FORMATION  OF  A  NEW  SOUTH  EMPIRE   190  

CHAPTER  5.  “THE  LEGIONS  IN  BLUE  AND  GRAY”:  SECTIONAL  RECONCILIATION  AT  THE  EXPOSITIONS   236  

CODA:  A  DREAM  OR  NIGHTMARE?   275  

FIGURES   298  

BIBLIOGRAPHY   314  

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List of Figures Figure I: World's Columbian Exposition's “White City.” Figure II: The Cotton States and International Exposition Figure III: Tennessee Centennial Exposition Figure IV: Tennessee Centennial at Night Figure V: The Parthenon Figure VI: The New South—The Triumph of Free Labor Figure VII: Cotton States Negro Building Figure VIII: Chains Broken Statue Figure IX: DC Exhibit Figure X: Centennial Negro Building Figure XI: Dahomey Village Figure XII: Cotton States Woman’s Building Figure XIII: Centennial Woman’s Building Figure XIV: Unaccompanied Women Figure XV: Sham Battle Figure XVI: Chinese Village

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Introduction

Go into the country, almost within sight of the spires and lofty housetops of bustling, progressive Atlanta, and you will find yourself among a primitive people, who know little or nothing of the great world which lies beyond their ken of vision…To such as these the Exposition comes as a revelation. They gaze at its wonders without comprehending them, but what they see and hear cannot fail to loosen the bonds of lethargy which have compressed their faculties, and awaken

new ideas and ambition in their dormant brains.” – New York at the Cotton States

In the 1880s and 1890s the United States South had a problem on its hands. Despite the

best efforts of a solidifying middle class, northerners viewed the former states of the

Confederacy as backwards and outside modernity. In the day’s popular culture and literature,

southerners, white and African American, were lambasted for their uncouth behavior, social

problems, and stunted economic growth. In the last decades of the nineteenth century an answer

to this problem was found in the industrial exposition movement sweeping the Western world.

Beginning in 1881 with Atlanta’s International Cotton Exposition, southern cities hosted

international expositions, also known as world’s fairs, to attract investment, advertise the

region’s resources, and promote a distinctly southern identity and culture. The South’s

expositions were representative of an ideology that called for a “New South” based not on the

region’s agrarian past but one defined by urban industrial manufacturing. The expositions

presented a southern future of a scientific and diversified economy based on a racially

2

hierarchical society. They were advertisements for and articulations of a unique southern

modernity, a Jim Crow modernity.1

With the exception of the New Orleans World Cotton Centennial in 1884, the South’s

world’s fairs remained small and lacked federal appropriations. This changed with the World’s

Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893. The Chicago exposition transformed the scale

and scope of world’s fairs in the United States. With just under 30 million visitors, the

Columbian Exposition was the cultural and social event of the decade. The southern expositions

that followed, while not attempting the scale of Chicago, attempted to duplicate its scope and

impact. Expositions in Atlanta, Georgia (1895), Nashville, Tennessee (1897), Charleston, South

Carolina (1901-02), and Norfolk, Virginia (1907) were deeply influenced by the Columbian in

form and content. At these fairs, urban middle class and elite southerners created idealized

worlds they hoped would draw investment and demonstrate to southerners the need for progress

and industrial development. In their celebration of modernity and industrial capitalism, the

New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, GA (Albany, 1896), 276.

1 On the popular and at times very real image of a benighted and backward South see Peter Kolchin, A Sphinx on the American Land: The Nineteenth-Century South in Comparative Perspective (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003); Karen Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Natalie Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012); Leigh Ann Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006). On the New South see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951); Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1970); and Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

3

South’s expositions represented an important effort to break free from the stereotypical images

of the region as backward and agrarian.2

Although southern expositions attempted to replicate the World’s Columbian, they

remained rooted in the South’s social, economic, and political realities. A key difference to

Chicago, which effectively barred black involvement, was that southern fairs opened their doors

to the participation of African Americans. Management of the races was a central tenet of New

South ideology. New South spokesmen believed that northern investment would only flow south

if southerners demonstrated a restrained approach to the so-called “Negro Question.” With the

participation of African Americans at the expositions, New South boosters launched a public

relations campaign to demonstrate that southerners alone had the answer to the question.

For the members of the black elite and middle class who supported and organized the

fairs’ Negro Exhibits, the buildings were important sites to demonstrate the “progress of the

race” and educate and uplift working class African Americans. Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta

Compromise” speech at the 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition succinctly

summarized the motivations of the black exhibition committees. According to Washington,

blacks should forgo political and social rights in favor of economic development. At times

controversial, the Atlanta and Nashville expositions had widespread support amongst African

Americans. However, as the realities of Jim Crow sank in, the Charleston and Norfolk

expositions became targets of derision and protest by many prominent blacks, including leading

2 On the Columbian Exposition’s attendance see Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 40.

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activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois. In the end, the Negro Exhibits were a compromise in the

pursuit of civil and economic rights, much like Washington’s speech.3

In their size and scope the South’s international expositions transcended the old ties of

the local. Exploding the traditional boundaries that defined “the South,” they looked to the

Caribbean and Latin America as imperial extensions of the region. They put forth an argument

for the South as not only important to the nation but also central to extending U.S. empire across

the hemisphere. Southern international expositions were also part of a larger push to persuade a

peripheral rural South to acquiesce to the powers of centralization. The New South would be

based on cities’ abilities to draw resources from the countryside and transform them into

manufactured products. The expositions were a celebration of a new urban power rooted in

middle class men not tied to old plantation families. It is not surprising, then, that the South’s

two largest expositions, Atlanta’s 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition and

Nashville’s 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition, were hosted by inland cities that emerged as

major players in the postbellum period and whose growth was largely dependent on the railroad.

This dissertation began as a response to C. Vann Woodward’s observation that the

South’s late nineteenth century expositions were places for the worship of the “alien gods of

Mass and Speed.” What, I wondered, made mass and speed so alien to turn-of-the-century

southerners? While I was aware of the rural nature of the South, it was odd that these hallmarks

of industrial modernity would be foreign to southerners. Was not Woodward’s book about mass

3 On the intersection of Booker T. Washington, the “Atlanta Compromise,” and the Cotton States Exposition see Robert J. Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2009), 125-129. On the Jamestown boycott see Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900-1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 150.

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and speed in the South? Did he not start with the transformations of the railroad—that

quintessential technology of modernity? Why then were mass and speed so alien?4

A persistent notion exists that the South lagged behind the nation’s embrace of modernity

in the late nineteenth century. Dating to the national debates over slavery in the antebellum

period the South and its culture has been viewed by scholars, northerners, and even some

southerners as the antithesis of modernity and industry.5 Following the Civil War, the South of

popular culture became a salve to the modern experience. The “moonlight and magnolias” of a

mythic Old South was more tenacious than the New South image of a modern and industrial

region. Even today, the South is more likely to be represented in the popular imagination by the

History Channel’s Swamp People or TLC’s Here Comes Honey Boo Boo than the modern and

diverse cities of Atlanta, Georgia or Charlotte, North Carolina. These reality television series

depict rural and uneducated southerners who are out of touch of with the modern world and are

not far removed from the “country rube” and dialect stories of the late nineteenth century. At the

4 Woodward, Origins, 124.

5 For historians who have challenged the notion of a premodern antebellum South see Roger William Fogel and Stanely L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974); James Oakes, Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South (New York: Knopf, 1990); Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Save Market (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Diane Barnes, Brian Schoen, and Frank Towers, eds., The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). For the ways in which the New South embraced modernity and industrial capitalism see Ayers, Promise of the New South; James Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Mathew Lassiter and Joeseph Crespino, “Introduction: The End of Southern History,” in The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism, eds. Lassiter & Crespino (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 3-22; and Ring, Problem South.

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same time, the South did and continues to lack in key indicators of industrial and commercial

modernity.6

The purpose of this dissertation, then, is to make sense of the contradiction between a

modern South with imperial intentions and a region lagging behind. By narrowing the question

of modernity to a specific time and space, I place the South at the centre of the conversation over

late nineteenth century industrial capitalism and U. S. Empire. Using the 1895 Cotton States and

International Exposition and the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Exposition as lenses, I argue that

southerners transformed modernity by making it Jim Crow. I contend that southern elites and

ideologues confronted the problems—both real and imagined—of a benighted South far earlier

than the 1920s and 1930s as Natalie Ring and Leigh Ann Duck have recently proposed. Through

the expositions, New South boosters presented an argument for an industrial and modern South

on the region’s own terms.7

The Atlanta and Nashville expositions suggest the ways in which southerners were open

to the liberal ideas of capitalist modernity at the same time as they presented a solution to the

supposed problems of multiracial industrial democracy. Unlike the much-analyzed Columbian

Exposition, African Americans presented their own vision of modernity within the fairs’ “Negro

Buildings.” While northerners excluded African Americans from their vision of an

industrializing U.S., white southerners included blacks in a Jim Crowed version of modern

progress. To the white organizers of the fairs the Negro Building and its exhibits were testimony

of their paternalistic goodwill. They were representative of New South ideologues’ ability to

imagine a multi-racial, if hierarchically organized, modern society. Although the rhetoric

6 Cox, Dreaming of Dixie, 4, 57; Kolchin, Sphinx on the American Land, 8-11. See also Cox’s ongoing online project Pop South: Reflections of the South in Popular Culture, southinpopculture.com, accessed April 8, 2013.

7 Ring, Problem South; Duck, Nation’s Region.

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surrounding the exhibits had a tinge of equality, the reality was that the fairs’ organizers viewed

the buildings as way to demonstrate their guidance of a childlike race. At the same time, the

Negro Buildings and the black organized Negro Exhibits opened the door for African Americans

to present their own vision of modern progress. The expositions, then, presented a New South

vision that combined late nineteenth century modernity with the region’s racial dynamics.

Beyond the unique participation of African Americans, the inclusion of “Woman’s

Buildings,” open displays of Civil War memory, and anthropological villages were essential to

the South’s presentation of a modern region. The expositions created a forum through which

southern white women reconciled the tension between modernity and tradition without upsetting

the gender hierarchy of the late nineteenth century. Southern white women offered themselves as

exemplars of modern womanhood opposed to the supposedly corrupted factory girls of northern

industrial cities. The fairs were also sites for Civil War memorialization and reconciliation. Civil

War reunions created a cognitive disjuncture in which the region was moving forward while

claiming its days of glory were in the past. This disjuncture was assuaged through a language of

manliness that transcended time and space to link Americans in the common experience of war,

uniting Americans for future imperial adventures. Lastly, the expositions mobilized ideas of

industrial progress and race hierarchy to formulate a blueprint for a distinctly southern imperial

expansion. In the end, this dissertation makes clear the ways in which southerners, often

considered on the periphery of change, responded to dislocating events by rooting their responses

in the local. The specific economic, social, and political realities of the South shaped southerners

reactions to and articulations of modernity and empire.

The Atlanta and Nashville expositions were the embodiment of a “New South” vision for

the region. The New South model of economic modernization was the result of an interconnected

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group of urban elites evangelical in their desire to bring material and industrial progress to the

region. Despite having an economic growth rate that was equal to most other parts of the country

in the late nineteenth century, the South still supported less real industry and commerce than the

North.8 With limited capital and a reticent planter class in the rural hinterland, southern urban

elites developed a program of modernization known as the “New South Creed.” This creed,

always loosely defined, attempted to convince southerners to adopt a more northern plan of

modernization. New South boosters believed that there could only be reconciliation between the

North and South, racial peace, and a new economic and social order if the southern economy

turned to scientific and diversified agriculture and continued to grow its manufacturing industry

along the lines of the North. The New South creed amassed a large following in both the North

and South and became the modus operandi for the South’s business, railroad, and industrial

interests in the 1890s.9

New South ideologues understood that many southerners remained suspicious of what

they viewed as plans to welcome Yankee economic domination so soon after the South had rid

itself of Federal oversight. Recognizing that their program of agricultural diversification,

industrialization, and urbanization disturbed many white southerners’ belief that racial harmony

was dependent on a hierarchical agricultural society, New South boosters went to great lengths to

emphasize the southerness of their vision. Slavery in the New South vision became not a moral

wrong but an economic wrong. The Old South was not a contradistinction to the new but a part

8 Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: Harper Collins, 1994), 6. Although the South was largely rural at the time of the fairs, its agricultural economy had been in decline since the 1880s. From 1880 onwards growth in value-added manufacturing had outpaced that of the nation. David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1982), 7.

9 Gaston, New South Creed, 7; Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture, 189. See also Woodward, Origins; and Ayers, Promise.

9

of the New South’s linear history. By romanticizing and idealizing the southern past, New South

boosters hoped to make their vision palatable to the majority of southerners.10

The second part of the New South program was focused on winning over the nation.

New South spokesmen in the 1880s launched promotional campaigns to encourage economic

growth and investment. They inundated regional and national newspapers with articles and

stories advertising the South’s natural resources and its suitability for northern investment and

immigration. Alongside newspapers, magazines, and lectures, the South’s expositions were key

components in showcasing the region to the nation and world. Lastly, management of the races

was a central tenet of New South ideology. Jim Crow laws and disfranchisement were signifiers

of the New South leadership’s ability to manage the races in a supposedly peaceful manner and

provide would be investors with a cheap tractable labor force.11

The New South model of modernization was never as effective as its proponents

believed, and by the late nineteenth century the South was divided over what path the future

should take. A rising urban elite and middle class, consisting of whites and African Americans,

adopted a northern viewpoint that industry and capital were required to drag the South out of its

economic doldrums and usher in a period of liberal democracy. This was the vision presented by

the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions. On the other hand, the planter elite in

the rural areas of the South pushed for industrial development on their own terms. Their vision

was far more hierarchical than the proponents of liberal capitalism in Atlanta and Nashville

favored. For rural farmers pinched by declining economic power and new consumer desires the

answer emerged in a radical political movement known as Populism that was noticeable for its

10 Gaston, New South Creed, 160; Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture, 152.

11 John Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge, UK, 1982); Gaston, New South Creed.

10

absence of mention at the expositions. For African American sharecroppers and rural black

southerners, the only option was to vote with their feet and leave the rural South, heading first to

the region’s growing cities and then onwards to the North. In the end, the 1893 depression, the

most severe economic downturn the United States had faced, restricted the real choices open to

all four groups. In 1895 at the start of the Cotton States exposition the region had made strides

but as the expositions demonstrated the New South remained for many a dream of the future.12

The cities of Atlanta and Nashville were simultaneously by-products and drivers of the

New South. While both cities had antebellum origins, they grew exponentially in the last decades

of the nineteenth century. Their central position as nodes in an expanding southern rail network

explains much of this growth. Railroads drove the nineteenth century economy. Following the

Civil War, the South quickly caught up with northern railroad expansion. By 1890 ninety percent

of southerners lived in a railroad county. Railroads transformed the region: new cities sprung up

where multiple lines met, new goods and products flooded the marketplace, plantation owners

pushed into the interiors of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama confident they could move

12 On the urban elite and middle class see Ayers, Promise of the New South. On the path taken by the region’s planter elite see Jonathan Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1978); Dwight Billings, Planters and the Making of a “New South”: Class, Politics, and Development in North Carolina, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979); and Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986). On Populism see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); Bruce Palmer, ”Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980); and Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). On African American sharecroppers and mobility see William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1991); and Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998).

11

cotton and other staples to market quickly. Railroads changed southerners’ orientation from

country to city.13

Atlanta’s growth in the postwar period was nothing short of miraculous. Destroyed by the

Union Army, its spectacular rise from the ashes lent it the moniker of the “Phoenix City.” By the

turn-of-the-twentieth-century, Atlanta was the South’s most dynamic city. In 1860 Atlanta’s

population was just under ten thousand. A decade later it doubled and, by 1890, Atlanta’s

population had risen to sixty-five thousand people, a six hundred and eighty five percent increase

in three decades.14 The quick recovery of the rail network was the main reason for this growth.

Already a terminus for four railroads, Atlanta became the centre for fast freight associations

seeking to transport inland cotton and foodstuffs to the Atlantic seaboard. Its merchants

rebounded after the war putting together aggressive programs to entice wholesale and retail

grocers to the city. A Board of Trade was formed in 1866 and, by the 1870s, delegates and city

council members traveled as far a field as Chicago and Indianapolis to attract trade. Lastly, the

construction of Kimball House in 1871, a six-story hotel with 317 rooms, made the city a

principal destination for southern travellers.15

Having established itself as a trading city in the 1860s and 1870s, Atlanta grew its

industry in the 1880s and 1890s. Local boosters and railroad lines joined to spearhead a variety

of projects to increase the city’s commerce and industry. One of these projects was Atlanta’s first

industrial exposition, the International Cotton Exposition held in 1881. According to historian

James Russell, “[m]ore than any other event during the 1880s, the International Cotton

13 Ayers, Promise, 9-33.

14 James Michael Russell, “Appendix A: Table 1,” Atlanta, 1847-1890: City Building in the Old South and the New (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 267.

15 Russell, Atlanta, 120-122.

12

Exposition put Atlanta on the national map as the headquarters of the New South movement.”16

Its organizers, which included the New South movement’s de facto leader, Henry W. Grady,

intended the exposition to be an advertisement for the city’s embrace of the North’s industrial

gospel. Later the 1885 National Commerce Convention and 1887 Piedmont Exposition continued

the work of the Cotton Exposition. Promotional events such as industrial fairs joined with major

investments by railroads, wholesalers, and local merchants to triple Atlanta’s commerce in the

1880s. The city also added four new railroad lines in that decade. Significantly, the Georgia

Pacific arrived in 1883, connecting the city to the growing coal and iron fields of Alabama. One

other railroad was built after the Georgia Pacific: the Seaboard Air Line, owned by Cotton States

exposition president Charles Collier, was completed in 1892.17

Like any boom city Atlanta experienced an influx of people, transforming not only the

city’s character but its leadership. Only twelve percent of Atlanta’s 1890 population had been in

the city in 1870 and its growth as a commercial and industrial city meant that Atlanta had stable

persistence rates through the 1880s. When people arrived in Atlanta they stayed. A similar

transformation occurred amongst the city’s economic and political elite. The majority were

between the ages of thirty and fifty, and only twenty members of the elite lived in the city prior

to the Civil War. Many of the new elite began their climb up the political and economic ladder

prior to arriving in the city. These were New South men not tied to the traditional planter-elite of

the region. At the same time, they gave an air of continuity. They lived in the same

16 Russell, Atlanta, 234.

17 Russell, Atlanta, 233-248. By 1890 eight railroads terminated in Atlanta: the East Tennessee, Virginia, & Georgia; the Western & Atlantic; the Marietta & North Georgia; the Richmond & Danville; the Central of Georgia; the Atlanta & Florida; the Atlanta & West Point; and the Georgia Pacific.

13

neighborhoods, attended the same churches, and took part in the same clubs as the city’s

antebellum elite.18

Low labor costs and relative labor peace contributed to Atlanta’s railroad, commerce, and

industrial growth. Despite these advantages Atlanta remained a city of trade and commerce

rather than industry well into the twentieth century. The lack of urban markets in the region

combined with high freight rates to ensure that Atlanta did not become the frequently promised

“Chicago of the South.” Despite these limitations and a relatively small industrial sector, Atlanta

experienced industrial growth throughout the 1880s. By the time of the Cotton States and

International Exposition in 1895, Atlanta rightfully claimed to be the quintessential New South

city.19

Although their histories diverged in the twentieth century, Nashville and Atlanta

competed for title of greatest New South city. Like Atlanta, Nashville owed much of its

postbellum wealth and growth to its location as a central terminus in the expansion of the

southern railroad network, especially the Louisville & Nashville road that connected the city to

New Orleans. Like Atlanta, the city became a center for wholesalers who expanded their markets

by enlarging their territory through price-cutting measures. The city also expanded its

manufacturing, particularly in cotton, while growing its meat processing, timber, coal and iron

industries. Unlike Atlanta, however, Nashville was home to the South’s largest educational

sector. Vanderbilt University, Peabody Normal, Meharry Medical College, and Fisk University

diversified the city’s economy and lent, in the words of historian Don Doyle, a “certain tone of

refinement and cultural amenities that boosters of the ‘Athens of the South’ never failed to

18 Russell, Atlanta, 250-258.

19 Russell, Atlanta, 249-250.

14

note.”20 Lastly, while Atlanta had a strong banking centre, it was surpassed in this regard by

Nashville.21 With a population of eighty-one thousand people in 1890, nine thousand fewer than

Atlanta, Nashville was the third largest city in the South in 1900.22

Throughout its period of growth, Nashville’s commercial and political elite joined with

railroad firms to advertise the city’s industry and promote northern investment. In the 1870s and

1880s, Nashville’s business leaders, bankers, and manufacturers formed a variety of clubs to

sponsor city building. In 1888 the Commercial Club was founded to “promote more intimate

social relations among the businessmen of Nashville, to encourage and promote the commercial

and manufacturing interests of the city, to advertise its diverse advantages…to foster and

encourage a public spirit which will benefit the city.”23 And like Atlanta, Nashville turned to

expositions to draw in outside money and support. The Nashville Centennial Exposition of 1880

was a small but significant affair in the city’s history. Like the much larger Tennessee Centennial

Exposition seventeen years later, the Nashville Centennial combined a reverence for the past

with a belief in progress. Like other southern expositions, Doyle notes that the Nashville

Centennial proclaimed “the New South creed of industrial progress, racial harmony, and national

reconciliation.”24 With the unveiling of an Andrew Jackson statue alongside the exposition’s

main building, the Nashville Centennial celebrated the old with the new.25

20 Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 51.

21 Doyle, Nashville, 53.

22 Russell, Atlanta, 262; Doyle, Nashville. New Orleans was the largest.

23 Quoted in Doyle, Nashville, 59.

24 Doyle, 10.

25 Doyle, 5.

15

Nashville, like Atlanta, formed the vanguard of the New South. Although lacking the

same degree of boosterism and self-promotion as the Phoenix City, Nashville prided itself on its

antebellum heritage, educational institutions, and contributions to the nation’s presidential

history. At the same time, behind the exterior of its erudite public image lay the cold calculation

of nineteenth century industrial capitalism. The northern owned Louisville & Nashville Railroad

was a driving force behind the city’s economic development. The merchant, banking, and

industrial class all put their efforts behind building the city into one of the South’s great urban

centres.26

As growing New South cities, Atlanta and Nashville were centres for the region’s

increasingly urban African American population. Like much of Atlanta’s postbellum white

citizens, its African American inhabitants were new arrivals. By 1900 African Americans

numbered thirty-five thousand, making up forty percent of the city’s population. In the three

decades after the war, black Atlantans built a small but strong economic base. In addition, the

wealthy and poor were brought together through fraternal organizations that provided avenues

for economic mobility and cemented the wealth of a small middle class. By the 1890s, however,

Atlanta’s black community was showing signs of social and economic stratification. An aspiring

middle class of clerics, small businessmen, porters, and professionals defined themselves as a

separate group through what historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called the “politics of

respectability.” In their dress, behavior, and participation in status-building institutions they

separated themselves from Atlanta’s working class. At Atlanta University, in the sizable and

nationally prominent Bethel AME, Friendship Baptist, and First Congregational churches, or in

the founding of the Atlanta Loan and Trust Company, Atlanta’s black elite took on notable

leadership roles. By the time of the Cotton States exposition, Atlanta was home to nationally 26 Doyle, 20-32.

16

prominent black clerics, Wesley J. Gaines and Henry McNeal Turner, both of whom played key

roles in the exposition’s Negro Building. In the 1890s Atlanta was a key site in the formation of

nationally prominent black elite who took it upon themselves to make clear a hierarchy within

the African American community, while simultaneously seeking to uplift working class and rural

blacks.27

Postwar Nashville was also home to a growing black elite and middle class and was a

destination for rural African Americans looking for wage work. Nashville’s black population

increased by eighty percent in the 1880s and reached almost forty percent of the city’s

population in 1890. Although African Americans could be found in all areas of the city, the poor

and working class were confined to the “Black Bottom” of south Nashville. The middle class and

elite settled around the black educational institutions of Walden University and Meharry College

in the south and Fisk University in the north. Geographic mobility within Nashville led to a

greater stratification within the black community than in cities like Atlanta where residential

segregation was strictly enforced. In Nashville elite blacks and clergymen often sided with white

reformers to address intemperance and crime in working class black neighborhoods. At the same

time, they raised their voices in protest over white discrimination and segregation. Like aspiring

middle class and elite African Americans across the South, Nashville’s black leadership

embraced the mantra of progressivism and supported the expansion of a black business culture

and economy. Nashville’s middle and elite classes continued the work of uplift in a

discriminatory environment, while the city’s working class was forced to live in unsanitary 27 Alison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004), 10, 31, 45, 102, 117. For the urbanization of the southern black population see Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

17

conditions and scrape out an existence on the margins of the city’s economy.28 Although the

1890s were witness to a solidification of Jim Crow, it remained a transitory period for

segregation laws. For instance, Atlanta and Nashville did not have streetcar segregation on the

books until the twentieth century, well after the fairs.29

Nashville and Atlanta were quintessential New South cities. Their economies relied on

the railway’s ability to transport agricultural goods through the city before heading north to be

manufactured or consumed. Located at the centre of rail networks Atlanta and Nashville

developed strong banking and business elites that sought to bring manufacturing to the South. A

growing middle class of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and entrepreneurs serviced the expanding

communities, while believing firmly that the New South Creed was the path to prosperity.

However, despite the pretenses to an industrializing economy, Nashville and Atlanta remained

intimately connected to the production of cotton and foodstuffs, lending both places an

agricultural air. From an outsider’s point of view the cities were contradictory. They were

modern and yet traditional. In the 1890s, with the United States in economic depression, both

cities turned to international expositions to present a modern vision of their city and the South.

According to this vision, northern capital would remake the South into an industrial and imperial

hub and in doing so transform the nation. Atlanta and Nashville’s dream of the future placed the

cities alongside New York and Chicago as drivers of a new American nation.

28 Bobby L. Lovett, The African-American History of Nashville, Tennessee, 1870-1930: Elites and Dilemmas (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1999), 71, 74, 85-87, 106; Doyle, Nashville, 109, 113.

29 Dorsey, To Build, 75; Doyle, Nashville, 117. Atlanta’s segregated streetcar laws were passed in 1903. Nashville’s streetcar law did not go on the books until 1905 and was met by a citywide boycott led by members of the city’s African American elite.

18

Beginning with London’s Great Exhibition in 1851, international expositions became the

premier spectacles of the nineteenth century. Crammed within their borders were contradictory

and complementary cultures, epistemologies, sciences, and economies. Despite the cornucopia of

images, spectacles, tastes, and sounds, the official rhetoric of the fairs was couched in a language

of order and control. They were to be experienced as perfect worlds, where society’s elites

harnessed the powers of industry and modernity and made them safe for all people. Expositions

functioned as shrines to a belief in material and cultural progress, offering proof to its

participants of a historical trajectory that led to the realization of a capitalist utopia. They were

conceived of and perceived as spaces of representation, spaces in which the dominant order

demonstrated, in a spectacular and grand fashion, its manufacturing, cultural, and racial

superiority.30

Within much of the scholarly writing on international expositions the representative

nature of the fairs has been widely accepted. In the expositions’ carefully planned and curated

“White City,” society’s business and political elites expressed and maintained their hegemony

[Figure 1: Chicago’s White City]. Recent work on other cultural practices, however, suggests

30 On the place of international expositions and their contributions to and shaping of nineteenth century politics, culture, and society see Rydell, All the World’s A Fair; Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22-27; Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988); James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Tony Bennett, Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995); Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of Late Victorian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Loren Kruger, “‘White Cites,’ ‘Diamond Zulus,’ and the ‘African Contribution to Human Advancement’: African Modernities and the World’s Fairs,” TDR: The Drama Review 51:3 (Fall 2007): 19-45; T.J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn, eds., Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010); Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 1895 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010); Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).

19

the performative possibilities located within the representational spaces of such cultural

institutions. Fairs were spaces in which visitors, entertainers, and educators performed

imperialism, consumerism, and modernity. Cultural institutions, such as expositions, functioned

on a variety of levels, some which have been thoroughly explored and others only now opened to

further analysis.31

In what is the best synthesis of the exposition movement in the United States, Robert

Rydell’s All the World’s a Fair argues that nineteenth century expositions were the foremost

space of representation for America’s elite. To Rydell the fairs offered a “cohesive blueprint of

social experience,” making the larger world comprehensible to the expositions’ provincial

visitors.32 In a world in which modernity and capitalism fragmented everyday life, fairs

presented a perfect world to white Americans. They functioned as a part of the late nineteenth

century’s “search for order.”33 The fairs were not passive spaces but embodied an active

didacticism. They did not reflect American culture but shaped it. Beginning with Philadelphia’s

1876 Centennial Exhibition and ending with the 1916 San Diego Exposition, U.S. fairs employed

a variety of cultural practices from scientific and technological displays to entertainment and

31 I have been particularly influenced by Judith Butler’s notion that gender is a performance dependent on place and social circumstance. Extrapolating from this we can see how all identity is a form of performance dependent on space and time. Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory," Theatre Journal 40:4 (1988): 519-533. For more on the performance of identity see Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 69; David Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 9-12; John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); Jayna Brown, Babylon Girls: Black Women Performers and the Shaping of the Modern (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 3, 60, 129; Susan Brownell, “Introduction: Bodies Before Boas, Sport Before the Laughter Left,” The 1904 Anthropology Days and Olympic Games: Sport, Race, and American Imperialism, ed. Brownell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 1, 10.

32 Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 2.

33 Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

20

amusement to convince white Americans of their participation in the nation’s progress.

According to Rydell, this not only had the effect of creating a sense of nationalism and belonging

but also muted the fractious class divisions of modern industrial society. International

expositions were key sites in which America’s elites expanded their cultural, social, racial, and

political hegemony over U.S. citizens.34

The international exposition movement ordered an increasingly connected world,

expanded the United States’ place in that world, and confirmed white Americans’ duty to uplift

and civilize the globe’s “colored races.”35 The fairs’ anthropological exhibits confirmed an

evolutionary hierarchy of humanity that placed Anglo-Saxons at the top and descended, largely

according skin color, to the “lowest” races, namely Africans, Asians, and Aboriginal peoples. In

addition to the scientific and staid exhibits of the nascent field of anthropology, international

expositions’ Midways were full of ethnological “living villages” where fairgoers witnessed

“primitive” and “uncivilized” behavior firsthand. “Dahommey Villages,” “Philippine

Reservations,” “Chinese Villages,” and “Streets of Cairo” presented non-Europeans as

backwards and primitive. In the safe environment of the expositions, white fairgoers traveled the

world and confirmed their superiority. These entertainments were understood in direct

contradistinction to the fairs’ White City. “Anthropological attractions charted a course of racial

progress,” notes Rydell, “toward an image of utopia that was reflected in the main exposition

buildings.”36 International expositions were important parts in the construction of a culture of

empire, in which white Americans were given the task of subduing and civilizing the world.

34 Rydell, All the World’s A Fair, 236.

35 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 5-8.

36 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 235.

21

In Rydell’s analysis, the visitor to the exposition was a passive agent internalizing the

lessons of America’s economic and racial elite. For Rydell the fair’s hegemony was static,

incorporating the visitor in a preplanned order. His work ignores the ways in which hegemony

resolves conflict relationally, creating an unstable balance. Hegemony is not the will of a ruling

class but a temporary, multi-dimensional historical bloc that is composed of various class

sections, subalterns, and dominated classes. It is, as Stuart Hall notes, a “system of alliances.” It

is essential, therefore, that historians analyze the ways in which participants and visitors to the

fairs performed their own modernities, sometimes in alliance with the fair’s prescribed order but

just as often in contradiction or juxtaposition to the expositions’ hierarchical arrangement.37

In his study of the museum and related institutions, cultural critic Tony Bennett

demonstrates the ways in which cultural institutions are arenas in which performances are both

dictated and witnessed. As Bennett notes, “[by] summarizing the course of mankind’s advance

and plotting its future path, expositions allow – invite and incite – us to practice what we must

become if progress is to progress, and if we are able to keep up with it.”38 The exposition

becomes a space that “constructs man in relation of both subject and object to the knowledge it

organizes.”39 Fairs and museums were places where visitors performed their own modernity.

Through their behavior and demonstration of “cognitive horizons” fairgoers participated in what

it meant to be modern. At the same time, this performance was conducted before the gaze of

one’s peers. New technologies of vision, such as the Eiffel Tower built for the 1889 Paris

Exposition Universelle, rendered the masses visible to their own inspection. The crowd became

37 Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10:2 (June 1986), 14, 16.

38 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 214.

39 Bennett, 7.

22

the ultimate spectacle and the means by which behavior was controlled. At the expositions

society became self-watching, self-regulating, “a society watching over itself.”40

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the state’s power of surveillance shifted from

the state to its citizenry, forming what Bennett calls an “exhibitionary complex.” The state

created new spectacles of power that did not seek to terrorize people by placing them on the

outside of power but rather placed the masses on the side of power as its beneficiaries. At the

expositions’ anthropological exhibits and displays of manufacturing superiority, white (male)

fairgoers were witness to the Anglo-Saxon progress of which they themselves were the

embodiment. Fairgoers became both the subjects and objects of knowledge. As Bennett explains,

exposition visitors came to know power and “what power knows, and knowing themselves as

(ideally) known by power, interiorizing its gaze as a principle of self-surveillance and, hence,

self-regulation.”41

Tony Bennett’s work makes clear that far from “blueprints of social experience,”

expositions, museums, zoos, and other cultural institutions were places where modernity was

performed. Exposition visitors demonstrated and practiced their gendered, racial, and modern

identities. In their ethnographic and anthropological displays, girded by an ideology of progress,

expositions provided a space where one encountered one’s ideal modern self both corporeally

and cognitively. Just as new forms of discipline and surveillance made the population objects of

knowledge/power, the exhibition/museum enabled people to become subjects of knowledge.

Expositions were not only spaces of didactic representation but were the organization of

performances that influenced visitors’ behavior and “cognitive horizons,” while allowing for

multiple and alternative performances of modernity.

40 Bennett, 10, 69.

41 Bennett, 3.

23

World’s fairs present an opportunity to examine what happens when fairgoers break free

from the act and perform their own understanding of modernity. Historian Paul Kramer notes

that rather than a single blueprint of experience, “each fair was in itself a mosaic of widely varied

cultural forms, each often uneasy with its neighbors.”42 For the visitor to the Philippine display at

the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the modern and the primitive, the self and the

Other, became overlapping experiences. Rather than viewing imperialism as an expression of

power and domination, the imperial discourse of the fair was marked by ambivalence. The

colonizer and colonized were not diametrically opposed but linked in a complex relationship.

The indigenous populations of the Philippines were viewed by fairgoers as both modern colonial

subjects and anthropological objects, symbols of science and symbols of entertainment.

Performances of the racial “other” denied Filipinos their coevality, while the place of their

performance, the modern exposition, confirmed it. In their performance as both primitives and

moderns, Filipinos disrupted the fair’s colonial order, obfuscating the ideological distance

between spectator and object, citizen and foreigner.43

World’s Fairs created order out of the disorder of industrializing society. As products of

industrialization, however, they often embodied the same disorder they sought to correct.

Exposition halls, stuffed to the rafters with objects, were open to what historian Steven Conn

42 Paul Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louts, 1901-1905” Radical History Review (Winter 1999), 77.

43 Here I am borrowing from the work of Johannes Fabian, who argues that late nineteenth century anthropology recognized the “primitive” as a contemporary ancestor, while denying their coevality by making the primitive an artifact of prehistory, rejecting their contemporaneousness. In her application of Fabian, Loren Kruger notes that the ethnographic showcase reinforced a false “ideological distance between primitive and modern.” Kruger, “‘White Cities,’” 21; Johhanes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

24

calls “accidental or unintentional” narratives.44 The sheer amount of exhibits meant that an

adoption of a uniform narrative was tenuous at best. Gazing at the displays of industry and

progress fairgoers conceived of their own dreams of the future that did not necessarily align with

the expositions’ organizers. Likewise, the hodgepodge of the Midway offered a distinct

alternative to the discipline of the fairs’ White City. It aligned the fairs with the future of mass

consumption far better than the ordered displays of industrial progress, which spoke more to

nineteenth century notions of the modern. Lastly, ethnological villages presented an image of

empire at the same time as the actors and people put on display disrupted the image.

International Expositions, despite the pretenses of order, were open spaces. They were not

prisons, asylums, or hospitals controlling and ordering behavior in a fixed environment.

Expositions were records of a city, state, or country’s dream of the future, at the same time as

they opened spaces for alternative dreams and hopes that contested, confirmed, and unsettled the

expositions’ vision of progress and modernity.45

At its core, modernity seeks the Enlightenment goal of ceaseless material and moral

progress through an embrace of individualism and scientific rationality.46 In the late nineteenth

century societal modernization permeated everyday life through the technological and scientific

changes of the second Industrial Revolution. The growth in scientific consciousness, secularism,

44 Steven Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 23.

45 Steven Conn notes that in much of the literature on museums and by extension expositions, museums “resemble penitentiaries, but with better interior decorating.” Foucauldian analysis can only go so far. The expositions were diverse spaces open to alternative possibilities, hopes, and dreams. Conn, Do Museums Still Need Objects?, 3.

46 Stuart Hall, “Formations of Modernity: Introduction” in Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, eds. Stuart Hall, David Held, Don Hubert, & Kenneth Thompson (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 4.

25

urbanity, wage-labour, mass consumption and markets, and the decline of traditional social

orders, contributed to a cognitive transformation that idealized a new type of subject “set free

from the constraints imposed by tradition to pursue [hers or his] own private ends.” Combined

with a belief in a guiding telos that led to a material and moral utopia, modernity disrupted

notions of permanency, producing a feeling of perpetual progress that sped up, dissolved,

displaced, transformed, and reshaped the present, destroyed the past, and transformed the

future.47

Modernity, however, was not an “acultural” process. Science, technology,

industrialization, secularization, and bureaucratization are not culturally neutral forms or

processes but are the result of what philosopher Charles Taylor calls a “constellation of

values.”48 This does not deny a causal relationship between the modern subject and

modernization but instead places modernization within a cultural framework. Modernity

develops along various temporal lines within specific cultural, social, and “civilizational”

contexts, producing not a single modernity by a wide variety of “alternative” modernities. A

cultural framework opens up the examination of modernity outside of a single Euro-American

modernity and allows for the possibility of studying multiple modernities. The notion of an

alternative modernity, then, encapsulates, in the words of cultural critic Dilip Gaonkar, the ways

in which “people ‘make’ themselves modern, as opposed to being ‘made’ modern by alien and

impersonal forces, and where they give themselves an identity and a destiny.”49 For white

southerners, their version of modernity would have to be Jim Crowed.

47 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities” in Alternative Modernities, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 2.

48 Charles Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” in Alternative Modernities, 175.

49 Gaonkar, “On Alternative Modernities,” 17-18, esp. 18.

26

Jim Crow modernity contained the liberating impulses of late nineteenth century

capitalism within the South’s racial and social hierarchy. Not backward looking, it saw a future

in which modernity and capitalism dissolved the longstanding divide between black and white.

Recognizing this, Jim Crow modernity at the fairs created, in the words of historian Walter

Weare, a “utopian apartheid” in which whites and African Americans consented to a separate

existence but agreed to work together for the general progress of the region and nation.50

Southern whites and blacks recognized that late nineteenth century modernity was a force that

could not be resisted at the same time as they identified the “Negro question” as central to the

formation of a southern modernity. For southern blacks, the question came down to how they

would be included in the modern world and, in the late nineteenth century at least, many

approved of Booker T. Washington’s plan for industrial and technical education. By

reconstructing black agricultural workers into a modern workforce, southern middle class blacks

believed that they would be accepted into American modernity and their rights as American

citizens and human beings at least partially recognized. For whites, however, the response to the

question was maintenance of social and racial order through the implementation of both de facto

and de jure controls on the participation of blacks in modern society. This debate over the

answer to the “Negro question” shaped American modernity by making it Jim Crow.

In advertising Jim Crow modernity, the South’s expositions gave the United States a

system of governance and control that extended to America’s nascent imperial adventures. In the

Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, natives were incorporated into an imperial modernity that

was Jim Crow in nature. Imperial subjects denied formal citizenship and American rights were

50 Walter B. Weare, “New Negroes for a New Century: Adaptability on Display,” The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall, eds. Elizabeth Jacoway, Dan T. Carter, Lester C. Lamon, & Robert C. McMath Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 90-123.

27

expected to participate in the nation’s industrial and material progress while remaining a separate

people.51 Likewise, with the migration of blacks to the urban North, Jim Crow modernity became

the de facto policy of the nation. In the early twentieth century, politicians, sociologists,

economists, and capitalists looked south for the answers to the day’s modern problems. “The

Negro” as both an ideological construct and a lived experience became a central ingredient in the

making of American modernity.52

Jim Crow was not a premodern or backwards looking system but a rational response by a

racist society to the disorder of industrial capitalism. When placed in a racial hierarchy in which

black inferiority was taken as fact, white paternalism in support of black progress created an

image of a benevolent white South. While the reality was starkly different, the image of a

progressive white and black South was essential to demonstrate the region’s modernity.

Although blacks may have lagged behind white southerners, the fact that they were progressing

was viewed as solid evidence for the South’s progress as a whole. In the spaces of the Cotton

States and Tennessee Centennial expositions, southerners constructed their own interpretations

of the New South. Jim Crow was a fluid and permeable reality that was reshaped by the very

51 As David Theo Goldberg notes in what summarizes both the colonial and the African American experience: “The colonized are inserted into global markets perpetually as laboring means, promised equality as economic players but perennially shortchanged as political and social equals.” Goldberg, The Racial State (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002), 96.

52 This is not to deny that “the Negro,” as concept, did not mean anything in the North until the arrival of southern blacks, instead the Great Migration re-ignited northerners’ attention to the Negro question. Jeremy Wells notes that the South’s plantations at the turn-of-the-century were viewed as solutions to the problems of a modern and multiracial industrial society. Race and its categorization, then, were essential to modernity’s construction of power. Wells, Romances of the White Man’s Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880-1936 (Nashville: Vanderbilt Press, 2011), 5-7, 116. See also Goldberg, Racial State, 108-116.

28

people it sought to control. In doing so, southerners of both races performed and constructed

their own Jim Crow modernity.53

This dissertation is divided into two parts. The first looks at the built-environment of the

Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions and how two buildings—the Negro Building

and Woman’s Building—defined the South to the nation. The second part is not focused on a

particular building but rather demonstrates how the expositions were important sites of memory,

patriotism, and empire. Chapter One traces the rise of the exposition movement in Atlanta and

Nashville in the 1890s. For the cities’ economic and political elite a World’s Fair was a solution

to the depression of 1893. It explores the machinations behind the expositions and the ways in

which the fairs were representative of a New South vision of modernity and future of the region.

Central to this vision was the place of African Americans in a modernizing southern society.

Chapter Two examines the ways in which fair organizers presented a region of racial peace,

while the African American elite used the Negro Buildings as a way to challenge the perception

that they were unfit for modernity and industry. At the same time, working class African

Americans and black commercial performers challenged both the fairs and black elites’ vision of

the future.

Chapter Three moves the discussion to the ways in which New South women contributed

to the cultural stability of a modernizing region. Presenting themselves as both New Women and

keepers of the South’s best traditions, New South women suggested that the region could

become new while maintaining the best of the old. In addition, southern white women, through

53 For the way in which modernity and capitalism threatened the southern racial system see Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Vintage 1998). John Cell argued that segregation was a modern and rational system. Cell, Highest Stage.

29

domestic exhibits, confirmed and accepted their roles as civilizing agents in a U.S. imperial

future. On the other hand, African American women, denied a presence in the Woman’s

Building, turned to the Negro Building as a way to present their middle class comportments and

embrace the “politics of respectability.” Southern women, white and black, played key roles in

the expositions’ narrative of a modern imperial South connected to its past.

Chapter Four compares the Atlanta and Nashville expositions to a growing literature that

reconceives the South not only as a vassal to northern industrialists, as C. Vann Woodward had

it, but as a launching point for empire. Expositions were central components in the late

nineteenth century’s culture of empire. The Atlanta and Nashville fairs were products of a

regional elite who viewed the South’s place in the nation and world through the lens of

imperialism. The expositions suggested the ways in which the South could escape northern

vassalage and become the launching point for a United States empire in the Caribbean, Latin

America, and Pacific.

Central to a nascent U.S. empire was the need for a martial culture rooted in the South’s

history of military action and defeat. Chapter Five suggests the ways in which Civil War

reunions and military memory at the expositions reunited the regions through a language of

remembrance and manhood. At the fairs, Civil War memory collided with New South hopes and

formulated both a remembrance of the past and a hope for a southern future that restored the

region’s military glory. Men from both sides of the conflict descended on Atlanta and Nashville

to reunite in a spirit of reconciliation that allowed the nation to heal prior to the Spanish-

American War of 1898.

The dissertation concludes by briefly examining the 1907 Jamestown Exposition held on

Hampton Roads just outside Norfolk, Virginia. A decade after the Tennessee Centennial it

presented a much-tempered dream of the future. Despite the best-laid plans of the region’s

30

ideologues, the South remained mired in an agricultural economy and culture that placed it at

odds with the rest of the nation. Jamestown was the last of the South’s nineteenth century

expositions. It linked a belief in providential progress with a dream of a capitalist and industrial

utopia. For many southerners, the reality of the region’s economy, politics, and culture in 1907

made this dream uncertain. For African Americans the Jamestown Exposition’s Negro Building

was representative of the ways in which their dreams had turned to nightmares. As segregation

became entrenched the accommodationist vision favored in Atlanta and Nashville faded. The

Jamestown Negro Building was met universally with scorn and faced a serious boycott. By the

end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the dream of the New South represented by the

Nashville and Atlanta expositions looked less likely of coming true for the expositions’

organizers and proponents.

Century Magazine journalist Roger Riordan used the phrase “a dream of the future” to

describe World’s Fairs after Buffalo’s 1901 Pan-American Exposition. The expression also

accurately captures the sentiment behind the South’s expositions at the turn-of-the-century. Here

in the spaces of Atlanta and Nashville was a waking dream of the future. For the region’s elite

and middle class the fairs were representative of a dream for a New South restored to its

economic and military importance within the nation. For southern women the fairs were an

opportunity to dream of a region that managed the gendered transformations of urbanization and

industrialization. African Americans, on the other hand, dreamt of a region and nation in which

they would be included on the basis of their history and economic contributions to the United

States. At the same time, the expositions were dreams: the economic, political, social, and racial

realities of the South often differed, sometimes substantially, from the visions of the exposition

organizers and building committees. The South’s international expositions, then, are important

31

spaces to re-examine the formation of United States modernity. Rather than an outlier, the South

adapted modernity to fit a racially hierarchical society that denied large sections of its population

the rights of citizenship while encouraging them to participate in the industrial progress of the

region. This dissertation moves the South and its racial system to the center of the modern

American experience.54

54 Quoted in Bruce Harvey, “World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, 1895-1902,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1998), 341.

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Chapter 1. “A Prophecy of our Glory and Power in the Future”: The New South Vision of the Atlanta and Nashville Expositions

“And looking at all this, at what the Parthenon signifies as well as what it embodies, captivated by the matchless serenity of its charm, realizing its contrast to the nineteenth century, one asks

again: ‘To what result is all this pageant of American material progress going forward?’ And one turns hastily away lest one look too long upon the unattainable and lose heart and despair of his generation. And yet, at least, it has set before its eyes a model without compare.” – Nathaniel

Stephenson, The Tennessee Centennial Exposition

On the day the Tennessee Centennial Exposition welcomed the President of the United

States, the Governor of Tennessee, Robert Taylor, stood before six thousand men and women

crammed into the Exposition Auditorium to hear a rousing speech in support of southern

progress. Taylor began by attacking those who claimed that the South was full of “lazy and

thriftless people” due to its “warm Southern climate that evaporates energy.” Taking target at

those who resided in the “Northern suburbs,” he offered the Centennial as proof of southern

development and the region’s place as a new industrial centre for the nation. The governor called

on the nation to view “the triumphs of our brain and brawn and the tangible evidences of our

activity.” For those men and women who still thought of the South as a land laid destitute by the

internecine war of thirty years ago, Taylor suggested they would “appreciate the fact that we

have wrought miracles” from the destruction. “This splendid Industrial Exposition,” he

concluded, “is a prophecy of our glory and power in the future, [it] blossoms like a beautiful

flower in the track of war, and is a token of eternal peace and brotherhood between the two

sections….I believe in these industrial expositions. They are the flowers of progress; they are the

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bouquets of civilization; they are the garlands of peace gathered from the gardens of human

brains and human hearts, and they bloom only in the most enlightened centers of the world.” For

the men and women behind Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition and Nashville’s

Tennessee Centennial Exposition, the fairs were a defining moment for the South. They

demonstrated the region as one of the “most enlightened centers of the world.”1

This chapter begins by exploring the motives behind the expositions, namely the belief in

a providential progress that would restore the South to its proper place within the Union. It then

moves on to examine the origins of the international expositions in Atlanta and Nashville before

making clear some of the key architectural features of the expositions. It concludes by focusing

in on a key phrase of the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions: the fairs were to

be understood as “object lessons,” educating southerners in the ideology of progress, modernity,

and industrial-capitalism. In the late nineteenth century objects were as important as texts to

convey meaning and the expositions were understood in toto as presenting an argument for

distinct southern modernity.2

The Cotton States and International Exposition and the Tennessee Centennial Exposition

were southern forays into the exposition movement. At the same time, they were infused with the

South’s social, economic, and political realities. As much as they were a celebration of southern

progress, at their heart was a desire to line the pockets of the region’s business and railroad elite.

They aimed to cement the power of this elite by presenting a world of order and stability. Despite

Nathaniel Stephenson, The Tennessee Centennial Exposition: First Published in the Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, April 9, 1897 (Nashville, 1897), 32.

1 Herman Justi, The Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Knoxville, 1898), 237.

2 On the nineteenth century’s “object-based epistemology” see Steven Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1922 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 4.

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the rhetoric of “progress” and “perfection,” internationalism and “patriotism,” the expositions

exposed the many fissures that defined southern life. At the fairs, the New South elite, consisting

mostly of railroad executives, bankers, and local businessmen, attempted to create a perfect

southern world that would attract northern investment, demonstrate to southerners the need for

progress and industrial development, and situate the South as an important partner in the nation’s

imperial future. Both educational and promotional, the expositions challenged the image of the

South as backwards and rural. They were the region’s coming out party after which an era of

glorious material and moral progress would restore the South’s prominence in the Union.

Given their centrality in the South’s economic growth, it is unsurprising that the railways

were the major sponsors of the expositions. Phrased in the language of southern patriotism, the

railroads maneuvered the expositions to their own economic advantage. Railroads advertised,

gave financial aid, exhibited, and transported people and displays at reduced rates to and from

the expositions. For the railroads the importance of the expositions was to advertise the South’s

natural resources.3 Railroads built impressive exhibits at the fairs to convince northern investors

and potential immigrants to come south. Without the support of the railroads Atlanta and

Nashville’s expositions would have failed to materialize or would have been greatly reduced in

size and importance.4

For the business and banking elite, whose fortunes were tied to the railways, the

expositions were a way to combat the depression of 1893. Prominent Atlanta journalist Clark

3 Read What the South Offers to Industrious People in the Country Traversed by the Nashville, Chattanooga and St. Louis Railway (Nashville, 1896), 11. Southern Pamphlets, Rare Book Collection at the Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. (Hereinafter RBC UNC).

4 A.G. Brown, “The Centennial Exposition” Nashville Banner (September 7, 1897): 3; Exhibits of the Southern Railway: Tennessee Centennial Exposition (1897): 2. Pamphlet. Southern Pamphlets, RBC UNC.

35

Howell believed that the Cotton States exposition would be a “break-water against the tide of

business depression.”5 Like the railroads, the southern business elite needed to attract northern

capital to finance the exploitation of the region’s natural resources as well as fund their

manufacturing interests. New South boosters hoped that the “exhibits of industrial and technical

schools” would advance the South to a “higher type of industry.”6 The goal of the expositions for

Atlanta and Nashville’s businessmen was to encourage manufacturing of all types, from

“cradles” to “coffins.”7 The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions were couched in

a language of municipal and regional pride that intended to sell the South as a place of good

investment and immigration.8

The expositions were also intended to train and educate southerners in the advantages of

industrial and commercial capitalism. At the South’s world’s fairs modernity became a learned

repetition of acts. Within the space of the fair, visitors were asked to perform a modernity that

was conducive to organizers’ New South vision. The degree to which visitors embodied the

lessons of the expositions was, however, uneven. Rural and working class southerners, white and

black, distorted the image of a harmonious and homogeneous New South. If education in modern

life was a step forward for the southerner, what literary critic Dana Seitler has called a

5 Clark Howell, “The World’s Event for 1895: The Cotton States and International Exposition” The Review of Reviews Monthly Illustrated: An International Magazine. Albert Shaw, ed. (February 1895), 160.

6 The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated. Including The Official History of the Exposition by Walter G. Cooper (Atlanta, 1896), 77; High Testimony to the Merits of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Nashville: Bureau of Promotion and Publicity, 1897). Microfilm Reel 127, No. 17. Smithsonian National Museum of American History Library, Washington, DC. Hereinafter SNMAH.

7 J.B. Killebrew, Recollections of My Life: An Autobiography by J.B. Killebrew. Written for His Children. Recollections of my life #3373-z, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC.

8 “Cotton States’ Big Exposition” New York Herald, August 3, 1895, p. 4.

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“progressive overcoming of self,” it was also shown to be incomplete.9 The sights, smells, and

sounds of working class African Americans and whites undermined the New South vision of

society. Although fairgoers were encouraged to both observe cultural displays and each other,

the necessity to perform their own self-regulating modernity opened spaces for alternative

performances. The heterogeneity of the fairs meant that individuals interpreted and internalized

each cultural display in a myriad of ways. It also made clear that many southerners were uneasy

with the proposed New South future. Unwilling to accept a new centralized authority rooted in

the South’s cities these southerners questioned the message of the expositions. The reality of the

fairs became not one of order but of contradictory cultural performances that contested southern

elites’ “dream of the future.” The expositions presented a disjointed vision in which the region

was emblematic of progress at the same time as they conceded the South lacked when compared

to the North. At the expositions the New South ideal of an ordered society came “unhinged,”

revealing the amorphous nature of southern society in the late nineteenth century.10

Late nineteenth century Americans were obsessed with “progress.” The term was the

watchword of the day. It summed up Americans’ belief in a divine path for the nation and

invested meaning in the present. It was the word that most encapsulated the nineteenth century

understanding of modernity and it was the expression most used in relation to the South’s

9 Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 23.

10 Paul Kramer suggests that the St. Louis exposition’s presentation of a perfect empire was “unhinged” by the performances of colonial subjects at the fair. Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901-1905” Radical History Review (Winter 1999), 102. Borrowing from the work of Judith Butler, I suggest that all forms of identity are performance based and are flexible according to context. See Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory." Theatre Journal 40:4 (1988): 519-533.

37

expositions. Long viewed by northerners as a region without progress or at the least a slow one,

the Atlanta and Nashville expositions’ celebration of southern progress was a clear rejoinder to

the conception of a bifurcated nation.11 “It is in every sense a remarkable object-lesson of

Southern progress,” reported Leslie’s Weekly of the Cotton States exposition. “It shows

conclusively that the cotton States have accepted modern ideas and are determined to make the

most of their opportunities and resources.”12 Connected closely to the nineteenth century

conception of “civilization,” progress was an assertion of the South’s civilized status, its place on

the forefront of “History,” and its racial advancement.13

Exposition historian Paul Greenhalgh notes that the word ‘progress’ “appeared in more

exhibition mottos and subtitles than any other in the century following the [1851] Great

Exhibition.” Expositions were the main vehicle through which the idea of progress was

demonstrated; that the world was moving forward, or as Greenhalgh astutely notes “appear to be

moving, away from the grim actuality of contemporary life.”14 In crafting a universal History,

Western Europeans and Americans placed themselves on the vanguard of time and classified

others according to their “temporal and geographic positioning in history.”15 This rhetoric, as

11 “The Heart of America” Confederate Veteran III:12 (December 1895) in the Confederate Veteran Index: Volume Three (Nashville: 1895): 355; and Justi, Official History, 10.

12 John Y. Foster, “The Meaning of the Atlanta Exposition” Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated (December 5, 1895), 363.

13 Robert Nisbett in his study of the idea of progress comments that “[b]y the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of progress had become almost as sacred to Americas of all classes as any formal religious precept.” Nisbett, History of the Idea of Progress (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 204.

14 Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988), 23-24.

15 Brett Bowden, The Empire of Civilization: The Evolution of an Imperial Idea (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), 2; 14, 50.

38

historians Gail Bederman and Daniel Bender have demonstrated, was interwoven with prevailing

assumptions of race, class, and gender.16 With one in four Americans visiting expositions in the

last two decades of the nineteenth century, world’s fairs were the premier spectacles of the

period. Expositions were spaces in which the dominant order demonstrated in a spectacular

fashion its cultural and social authority over an increasingly fragmented and interconnected

world.

As much as nineteenth century Americans believed in the power of progress there was

also a lurking fear of degeneration. Looking out upon large swaths of human history it was

apparent that nations and empires declined as easily as they developed. Americans’ obsessive

belief in the power of progress and civilization suggested a deep-rooted fear of the possibility of

degeneration. According to their own logic, degenerates, in the form of racialized minorities,

criminals, homosexuals and sexual deviants, the chronically poor, and the physically and

mentally disabled, lurked among them. The depression of 1893, widespread poverty, and the

violent class conflicts of the 1890s gave credence to the notion that perhaps degeneration was

closer to the reality of life than endless progress.17 While degeneration was taken to be a part of

natural and divine law, condemning degenerates by their own biology, many middle class and

elite Americans also feared degeneration lurked inside them. They feared that an atavistic animal

self existed beneath the surface of civilization and appeared sporadically leading to deviant and

abnormal behavior among society’s better classes. Only by maintaining strict Victorian

16 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 26; Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 6.

17 J. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, “Degeneration: An Introduction” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress Chamberlin & Gilman eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), xi-xii; Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 96.

39

behavioral codes, and providing space, especially for men, to release lurking atavistic behavior

did the middle class believe that degeneration could be held at bay. Progress and degeneration

were central to the way in which nineteenth century Americans understood themselves. Part

destiny, part self-improvement, the discipline of progress operated as a bulwark against the

degenerate tendencies of capitalism and industrialism.18

Atlanta and Nashville’s expositions’ celebration of progress was twofold. The first was to

make clear that the South was a progressive and not degenerate space. The South’s rural

economy and few cities confirmed northerners’ sense that the South lagged behind politically,

socially, and economically.19 This also partially accounts for the inclusion of African Americans

at the fairs. If, according to the day’s racial science, blacks were viewed as degenerate and lived

mostly in the South, it was necessary to demonstrate that, at the very least, the black middle class

was progressive, confirming the progressive character of the region as a whole. The second was

centered on power. Those who were progressive, in this case the urban elite and middle class,

were given an authority based in the laws of nature. By celebrating and presenting their progress,

New South boosters claimed an authority rooted in natural and historical law and formulated a

messianic vision in which all southerners joined the ranks of modern civilization. As the New

Orleans Times-Picayune reported, the Cotton States exposition was “considered a white stone

erected along the line of the south’s march of progress” and that the expositions marked the

18 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 7.

19 For the ways in which the South was viewed as lagging behing the North political, socially, and economically see James Cobb, Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999); Karen Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Natalie Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012).

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“beginning of a period of industrial activity, building, advancement, investment and

prosperity.”20

The Atlanta and Nashville expositions were foreshadows of the Progressive movement

that swept the South in the early twentieth century. Rooted in the South’s elite classes, the

expositions promoted the region and its economy while seeking to model the lives of all

southerners on bourgeois class values. In the words of historian Dewey Grantham, they wanted

to “modernize the South and to humanize its institutions without abandoning its more desirable

values and traditions….impose a greater measure of social order, to foster economic opportunity

an development, and to protect the weak and unfortunate in deserving cases.” The expositions

were trial runs in the social engineering campaigns of the opening decades of the twentieth

century. As the first advertisements of southern progress, the fairs were the initial salvos of a

new power rooted in the urban South that sought to reform the region in the twentieth century.21

The Cotton States and International Exposition ran from the 18th of September to the 31st

of December 1895 and grew out of an embarrassment over the representation of the South at the

World’s Columbian Exposition. Thirty million people visited Chicago that summer and were

witness to the greatest display of technological and commercial prowess the nation had ever

seen. The paltry or non-existent exhibits from southern states were a major embarrassment to

those southerners who made the trip to Chicago and served as an impetus for Atlanta’s business

20 “Some Echoes of the Exposition Opening” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 21, 1895, p. 3. On degeneration see Chamberlin & Gilman, “Degeneration,” xi-xii.

21 Dewey Grantham, Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1983), xvi. In many ways, the expositions were acts of class formation similar to that of the New York elite as described by Sven Beckert. See Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

41

and political leaders to bring an exposition to the Phoenix City only two years after the close of

the Columbian Exposition.22

The idea for a great exhibition was conceived by William A. Hemphill, the founder and

business manager of the Atlanta Constitution and was quickly taken up by other newspapers

during the Christmas season of 1893. In short order the idea was brought to the attention of the

city’s Chamber of Commerce. A committee of twenty-five leading citizens presided over by

Samuel M. Inman, a local businessmen and prominent investor in railroads and banks, formed to

investigate the feasibility of the enterprise. The idea was approved by the Chamber and the

committee established a Guarantee Fund of seventy-five thousand dollars from the city with

citizens contributing $134,000 for a total of $209,000. In the end, the exposition cost two million

dollars. The idea behind the name of the fair was to make clear the South’s resources, while

attracting trade from Latin America. A number of names were considered that explicitly

connected the Atlanta fair to South America such as “The Cotton States and Sub-Tropical” and

“The Pan-American” before “The Cotton States and International” was settled upon.23

The lead committee, which eventually formed the exposition’s Executive Committee,

was made up of men who came of age before and after the Civil War. It was the older men,

however, that dominated the executive. Like their younger counterparts they imbibed the spirit of

the New South and with “heart and soul” worked together “with oneness of purpose.” The

exposition’s official history made clear the connection between the old and new: “Here was

personified a greater truth which the outside world seems to have but dimly apprehended—that

the new South and the old are one, in person and in spirit.” In the eyes of its organizers time

22 Howell, “World’s Event,” 159; Margaret Severance, Official Guide to Atlanta Including Information of the Cotton States and International Exposition (Atlanta, 1895), 69; and H. G. K. “Atlanta’s Exposition” Baltimore Sun, June 10, 1895, p. 2.

23 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 5, 13.

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collapsed at the exposition where buildings could be built upon “old ruins” and the

“superstructure of a new era” cemented “wherein the new light of the present is savored with the

best ideas of the past.” For New South boosters this was an important point as many northerners

interpreted the exposition to be the product of a younger generation. “We are dazzled by the near

with its gauds,” claimed the Cotton States’ history, “while the pure light of the past streams over

us to wake some future renaissance.”24 To New South spokesmen modernity did not destroy the

past but collapsed it into the present, shaping the trajectory of the future.

Atlanta’s business elite readily contributed to the exposition viewing it as the best way to

promote their commercial interests both nationally and internationally. It was also this

international element that convinced Congress to give an appropriation to the fair. The executive

committee, working with the State Department, made certain that most Latin American

governments had at least heard of the exposition even if they had never heard of Atlanta.

Hemphill was elected President but retired for “business reasons,” giving way to Charles A.

Collier, a prominent banker in the city, who took on the role of President and Director General.25

With a Guarantee Fund and an international component, the executive committee

approached Congress for an appropriation for a Government exhibit. The participation of the

federal government was essential if the exposition was to attract foreign exhibits. A committee of

leading men along with representatives of commercial bodies from other southern cities, most

notably the President of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange, went before Congress. The most

24 Cotton States and International Exposition, 6-7.

25 The Atlanta Exposition and South Illustrated (Chicago, 1896): 7. Charles Collier was born in Atlanta on 19 July 1848. He graduated from the University of Georgia and was admitted to the bar in 1871. At the time of the exposition he was the Vice-President and Director of the Capitol City Bank, Chairman of County Commissioners, and Vice-President of the Georgia Loan and Investment Company. Collier had also served, alongside Henry Grady, as President of the Piedmont Exposition held in Atlanta in 1887.

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significant feature of the committee, however, was the presence of three prominent African

Americans: Booker T. Washington and African Methodist Episcopal Church bishops Wesley J.

Gaines of Georgia and Abram L. Grant of Texas. On March 22, 1894 a group of prominent black

Atlantans led by Gaines had gone before the Exposition Committee on behalf of the city’s black

population and pledged their aid and support for the enterprise. Taking into account black

Atlantans’ favor for the exposition, Samuel Inman suggested opening the exposition to African

Americans as way to “stimulate the race by an exhibition of its progress, at the same time giving

substantial evidence of the good will of the white people.” This fell in line with the white South’s

campaign to determine that it alone had the answer to the “Negro question.” And, according to

the official history, it was successful: “The good feeling extended to the Northern friends of the

Negro, who accepted this action on the part of the Exposition Managers as an earnest act of good

faith in the contention that the Southern people were the real friends of the black man.”26

Washington, Gaines, and Grant each addressed the Committee on Appropriations on

behalf of the exposition company. Their speeches were well received and led exposition

chronicler W. G. Cooper to claim that the “presence and the assurance of a Negro exhibit did

much to secure the appropriation.” Ultimately, Congress provided two hundred thousand dollars

for the construction of a Government Exhibit in Atlanta on the condition that the Negro Exhibit

be removed from the Government Building and given its own building. With the appropriation,

which came in August 1894, the executive committee had just over a year to build and complete

the exposition.27

26 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 7-8, 18.

27 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 8, 28. Cooper’s claim that the Negro exhibit did much to help the exposition cause is well founded. Both the official report of the congressional hearing on an appropriation for the exposition and the Treasury Department were certain that the inclusion of a Negro exhibit would be beneficial to region and nation and, perhaps mostly importantly, ticket sales. See 53d Congress, 2d Session: House of

44

After some delay it was decided that Atlanta’s Piedmont Park was the most suitable

location for the exposition. In April 1894 the city leased the park from the Piedmont Company.

The exposition’s construction progressed rapidly not least because the exposition was given the

use of a chain gang for a year by the County Commissioners to construct and grade the

exposition grounds. The decision to use a chain gang made many in the black press wonder how

“friendly” the organizers were to “the Negro.” The Parsons Weekly Blade wondered how the

exposition could demonstrate southern progress if convicts’ labor was used not only on the

grounds but throughout the state. “The Atlantic [sic] exposition is to show the development and

progress of the south,” wrote the Weekly Blade. “But no material development can excuse

Georgia for continuing such a system as this in handling her convicts. It is a system which

belongs to the dark ages.” Of the three hundred convicts employed by the exposition, the

Savannah Tribune estimated that only fifty were white and that most were African American

boys aged ten to seventeen. While the use of the chain gang suggested to the black press the

South’s continued backwardness, historian Alex Lichtenstein has demonstrated the ways in

which unfree labor was compatible to the region’s drive toward industrial modernity. The use of

convict labor, then, raised questions over how free black labor would be in the New South vision

presented by the expositions.28

Representatives: Report No. 1023; Treasury Department, May 21, 1894. House Committee on Appropriations, p. 20. Cotton States Expo 1895 – Souvenirs: Cotton States Subject File, Box 2; Folder 3. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA. Hereinafter KRC.

28 “The Convict Lease System” Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade, September 7, 1895, p. 1; “Atlanta Exposition-Other Notes” Savannah Tribune, April 13, 1895, p. 2. For the ways in which convict labor was reconciled with the South’s drive towards industrial modernity see Alex Lichtenstein, Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South (New York: Verso Press, 1995); Mathew Mancini, One Dies Get Another: Convict Leasing in the American South, 1866-1920 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996); and Karin Shapiro, A New South Rebellion: The Battle Against Convict Labor in the Tennessee Coal Fields, 1871-1896 (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1998).

45

The chain gang amounted to a one hundred thousand dollar contribution to the exposition

by Fulton County. Despite the convicts and Atlanta’s best efforts the fair remained incomplete

on opening day; buildings were half constructed, debris littered the grounds, and some exhibitors

were late in setting up their displays. Added to this was a major break in the main that connected

the pumps with the electric fountain, requiring the man-made lake to be drained and a new main

installed. It took another month before the electric fountain was operational. Notwithstanding the

professions of perfection and order, the first month of the Cotton States and International

Exposition was anything but. Many potential fairgoers chose not to waste their money on an

incomplete exposition and attendance was low, rising only with the arrival of the Liberty Bell in

October and later with the visit of President Grover Cleveland.29

Given the soft attendance the exposition faced financial hardship and by October it was

on the verge of financial collapse. The fair was two hundred thousand dollars behind, income

was low, and two-thirds of gate receipts were mortgaged to bondholders. In addition,

construction and electricity costs had been greatly underestimated. Although attendance

rebounded in November, the exposition suffered from excessive debt and on the first Saturday of

the month the exposition’s creditors ordered the Atlanta exposition foreclosed. On his way to the

fair, the sheriff, as a matter of courtesy, stopped at Samuel Inman’s house to inform him of the

bad news. Horrified at what was to happen, Inman proposed to raise one hundred thousand

dollars in second-mortgage bonds with half the subscription coming from himself. He also lent

the exposition fifty thousand dollars to help keep the fair afloat. In addition, Inman took control

of the exposition’s expenditures, reducing every department’s payroll, salaries, and forcing

department heads and officers to work without pay. These cuts, while generally not protested,

29 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 10, 18, 29.

46

did lead to a minor strike of Machinery Hall’s coal stokers, which was broken by having the

exposition’s officials shovel the coal themselves.30

The fair, saved financially, saw an uptick in attendance. On the 19th of November, twenty

thousand people attended Georgia Day, while a second Atlanta Day combined with South

Carolina and Inman Day (a reward for saving the exposition) brought sixty thousand people to

the fair. The exposition’s attendance was aided by hosting a large number of national

associations’ annual meetings. For the last month and a half, the exposition’s attendance was so

high that its final debt was insignificant. In the end, the Cotton States’ official record admitted

that the “expense to the community had been very great.” However, it boasted that “twenty times

as much had been realized by the business men of the city, while Atlanta added to her

achievements one more miracle, greater and more brilliant than all the rest, increasing her laurels

with international fame and winning the proud title of the bravest city in the world.”31

Nashville citizens were no less obsessed with commerce and industry than Atlanta’s.

However, unlike Atlanta, which was given the moniker “the Chicago of the South,” Nashville by

the late nineteenth century had developed a reputation as “the Athens” of the region for its many

institutions of higher learning. Although celebrating the South’s resources and prospects for

industrialization, the Tennessee Centennial’s organizers wanted to make clear the South’s

cultural sophistication.

The stated purpose of Nashville’s exposition was to celebrate the one-hundredth

anniversary of Tennessee’s admission to the Union in 1796. The Centennial’s Official History

proclaimed that while advertising and developing the “matchless and boundless resources of

30 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 11.

31 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 11-12; Justi, Official History, 219. Hosting annual meetings and special days was an important way for all expositions to ensure that attendance was decent.

47

Tennessee, to increase its population by inviting desirable settlers, and to increase its wealth by

tempting foreign capital” was important, the exposition’s main goal was to honor and

commemorate “the deeds of the pioneers of a great Commonwealth.” Indeed, the Centennial was

explicit in its backward looking orientation, hoping to educate Tennesseans who were “ignorant”

of the state’s history.32

The idea to celebrate Tennessee’s centennial with an international exposition came from

Nashville lawyer Douglass Anderson. A year before the World’s Columbian Exposition in

Chicago, Anderson sent a letter to the state’s major newspapers suggesting an exposition to

celebrate the upcoming anniversary. Hoping to provoke a contest, Anderson named Knoxville,

Chattanooga, Nashville, Columbia, Jackson, and Memphis as suitable cities to host the

celebration. Anderson’s suggestion, however, was quickly forgotten in the initial financial panic

of 1893. At a time when “labor was idle” and “capital in hiding” few were willing to invest the

time and money to bring a great exposition to Tennessee.33

With economic stagnation continuing into 1894, several prominent citizens in Nashville

came to view an exposition as a way to confront the depression and kick-start the city and state’s

recovery. As a result, prominent Nashvillian, Captain W. C. Smith, floated the idea of hosting a

world’s fair to celebrate the state’s centennial. “The financial depression and shrinkage in values

in this city and throughout the county,” noted Smith in a speech to Nashville’s Commercial Club,

“suggests and demands that an organized effort be made to divert the attention of our own

people…from the general depression.” Club members agreed with Smith’s assessment and a

32 Justi, Official History, 3-4.

33 Justi, Official History, 13-14.

48

resolution was made to form a committee for the purpose of hosting a great exposition in

Nashville.34

The Commercial Club published its resolution to bring a World’s Fair to Nashville and

the city and state press picked up on the idea. In early 1894 the club brought together a

committee of twenty-five leading citizens to push for a State Convention in June. At the

convention an Executive Committee was formed to establish the exposition’s departments and to

ensure that the exposition remained on sound financial footing. Members of the Executive

Committee formed a “Centennial Corporation” and each took out stock in the company. The

committee was able to secure fifty thousand dollars from Davidson County. They were, however,

unable to convince either the state or the city to contribute to the cause, both citing that private

citizens had to contribute before public funds were made available. The Executive Committee

began a massive publicity campaign for the exposition in early 1895 trying to elicit support from

across the state but was met with general indifference. Due to the lack of interest a mass meeting

was held on July 8, 1895 to determine whether or not there was to be a centennial exposition. In

the end, it came down to whether Nashville would put up the funds. In a dramatic turn, late in the

meeting city council arrived to tell the gathered group that the city would indeed contribute, with

the consent of the state legislature, one hundred thousand dollars to the Tennessee Centennial

Exposition Company.35

The effect of this influx of capital was immediate. Led by Henry Mocker, a cooper who

paid twenty-five dollars for a subscription, Nashville citizens rallied to the cause raising one

hundred and twenty thousand dollars by the end of July. Also in July, the exposition company’s

executive was reorganized and John W. Thomas, President of the Nashville, Chattanooga & St.

34 Justi, Official History, 15, 18.

35 Justi, Official History, 18-28.

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Louis Railway, was made President of the company. Working without pay, Thomas guided the

exposition company for the next two and a half years. His first order of business was to appoint

Major Eugene C. Lewis, owner of the Nashville American newspaper and a civil engineer,

Director-General of the exposition.36

Nashville’s West-End park was chosen as the site of the exposition and work began on

the grounds in August 1895. In September plans were drawn up for the buildings with an exact

replica of the Parthenon, to highlight Nashville’s Athenic qualities, the central feature.

Construction started quickly and by October the foundation and cornerstone were laid. As work

continued throughout 1896, the fair’s construction became an important source of income for

Nashville’s labor force hit hard by the depression. The exposition also created a small boom in

Nashville proper as a “City Improvement Club” formed to improve the sanitary conditions of the

city, reduce smoke, remove fences, improve lawns and beautify homes. Despite the progress and

support of Nashville’s citizens, it became clear to the exposition executive that the Exposition

Company, without support from the state or federal government, would not be financially secure

if the fair was held in 1896, the year of Tennessee’s centennial. Moreover, fearful that the

election of 1896 would be too acrimonious and political tensions too great, the fair’s organizers

pushed back the exposition a full year to the 1st of May 1897 and ending on October 30th. Despite

the delay, work continued through 1896 and the state dutifully celebrated its centennial on June

1, 1896 at the unfinished exposition site with fireworks, a parade, reception and speeches.37

36 Justi, Official History, 29, 31. On Lewis see William R. Majors, Editorial Wild Oats: Edward War Carmack and Tennessee Politics (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984), 140; and Kincaid A. Herr, The Louisville & Nashville Railroad: 1850-1963 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2009), 138.

37 Justi, Official History, 34-35, 37.

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In late 1896 the Centennial Exposition was still without a federal appropriation. After

careful lobbying and with support from Tennessee’s federal representatives a bill was finally

passed in December giving the exposition one hundred and thirty thousand dollars of which

thirty thousand was to go to the construction of a Government Building. Despite the federal

appropriation the Tennessee State Legislature was averse to fund the exposition. A relic of the

reaction to the over-spending of the Reconstruction era, southern state governments were

reluctant and sometimes constitutionally restricted from giving funds to private enterprises. In

the end, Tennessee gave the exposition only half of its requested one hundred thousand dollars of

which thirty thousand dollars was to go to the Agricultural Building. Nevertheless, because of

the financial acumen of the exposition’s executive committee, the Tennessee Centennial

Exposition was one of the few world’s fairs that cleared all its debts.38

There was one final hurdle for the Exposition Company: West-End Park was technically

outside Nashville city limits, making the exposition “wide-open.” It could not be policed by the

Nashville force nor could there be restrictions on the sale of alcohol. Nashville’s conservative

citizens rallied against the exposition fearing it would corrupt the city’s weaker denizens. In

response, the Centennial executive proposed that the exposition be incorporated as its own city

giving it the power to fine, raise a police force, and restrict the sale of liquor. After some debate

in the State Legislature and with the blessing of the Tennessee Supreme Court the two hundred

acres of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition grounds were incorporated as Centennial City.

Like other cities, Centennial City had a mayor and Board of Alderman, although these positions

were not voted offices but appointed by the Tennessee Centennial Exposition Company. The

new city’s Board of Alderman were authorized by the State to pass city ordinances necessary for

the “preservation of good order and to protect the city’s morals and its health.” The Centennial 38 Justi, Official History, 38-40.

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city’s charter allowed the city to create and fix “fines and penalties for the violation of these

ordinances, such as gambling, selling whisky, brandy, etc., breaches of the peace and improper

conduct generally.”39

Laws against drunkenness, gambling, carrying deadly weapons, and prostitution were to

ensure that the fair did not succumb to the problems of the modern metropolis. Other ordinances

suggest that the fair’s organizers believed that visitors would not know how to behave in urban

public space. Laws banned public nudity, cross-dressing, indecent or lewd acts, walking on the

grass, and bathing in the “interior waters of the ground.” Clearly the Centennial executive

believed that some visitors needed instruction on the correct performances of modern public

behavior. By August, four months after the start of the fair, the city council added more

ordinances. These new laws prohibited fireworks, music, explosives, keeping disorderly house,

disturbing the peace, soliciting trade or alms, and smoking in buildings. The Centennial city

council targeted exhibitors who sold alcohol after eleven on weeknights and eleven-thirty on

Saturday and who kept a “disorderly house, or permit in his house or any tenement in his

possession under his control, any person to be drunk, noisy and boisterous in his behavior, to the

annoyance of any person.”40

The Centennial City established its own police force known as the Centennial Guard,

which enforced city ordinances as well as operated as a de facto fire department. Every member

of the force was required to sleep within the grounds and no guard was permitted to leave the fair

without a pass. The Centennial Guard’s equipment consisted of a light cavalry sabre, a club, and

pistol. Their uniform was Confederate grey and trimmed with black braid and edged with red

cloth. Herman Justi, the Centennial’s official historian, commented that they made a “fine

39 Justi, Official History, 92-93, 411.

40 Justi, Official History, 489-91.

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appearance in this neat and soldierly dress.” Beyond the guards, malevolent fairgoers could find

themselves at the mercy of the Centennial City’s Secret Service Bureau, run by a former

Pinkerton and consisting of 233 men.41 Those caught were judged at the city’s court presided

over by the mayor. In what was essentially a police state, the Centennial Executive created a

world of seeming harmony. But as the second passing of ordinances suggest, fairgoers did not

follow the rules and disturbed many of the social decorums and public behavior expected by the

Centennial City.42

When the Tennessee Centennial Exposition opened on May 1, 1897 it was the largest and

grandest exposition ever held in the South. Its stated purpose was to “show [Tennesseans’]

patriotism, promote industrial, commercial, and educational progress, illustrate the perfection of

art, the progress of science, the genius of invention, and, in fact mark ever step in the onward

march of civilization.”43 Perhaps because of Atlanta’s exposition only two years earlier or

because of the other expositions sprouting up in response to the success of the Columbian,

national press attention was minimal. Nevertheless, for the five months of the exposition

Nashville welcomed over one and a half million fairgoers.44

For the expositions’ organizers the most important piece of evidence for the South’s

progress was the fairs’ built environment. The grounds and buildings were object lessons writ

41 Justi, Official History, 411-412.

42 Justi, Official History, 408.

43 “All Roads Lead to Nashville” (Nashville, 1897), 1. Microfilm Reel 127: No. 15. SNMAH.

44 Justi, Official History, 439. The total attendance at the Tennessee Centennial was 1,786,714 but as the first truly international exposition in the South, Atlanta received the most national attention of any fair held in the region.

53

large with the power to shape visitors morals and behavior.45 As a result, the directors thought

long and hard about the style and architecture of the fairs. Deeply influenced by Chicago’s White

City both the Cotton States and the Centennial’s executives wanted to create a uniform site that

suggested order and strength compared to the disorder and heterogeneity of Atlanta and

Nashville proper. The White Cities of the exposition movement offered an explicit contrast

between the top-down approach of the fair and the democratic disorder of the actual nineteenth

century industrial city. “It is the accompaniment played by the distant city to the spectacle of the

fair that makes the present exhibition to such peculiar interest,” wrote Nathaniel Stephenson of

Nashville.46 Expositions were “fairylands” that overpowered with their “beauty” and

“perfection.”47 At the same time, rather than simply follow the Beaux-Arts style of Chicago both

executive committees wanted to put their stamp on city creation.

In Atlanta the dominant architectural style was the out-of-date Romanesque. Nashville,

on the other hand, looked to ancient history by choosing Classical as its motif. Both decisions

presented a linear history in which past glories connected to the present and suggested an ordered

and uniform future. In Atlanta there was some debate over whether to use a local architect but in

the end the Buildings and Grounds committee decided, due partly to style and partly to budgetary

concerns, to go with New York architect Bradford Gilbert to design and supervise the

construction of the fair’s twelve main buildings. Gilbert, who had made a moderate name for

45 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995), 48. In the nineteenth century architecture was considered a “moral science.” It was believed that good architecture had the power to control and tame people’s behavior.

46 Stephenson, Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 7.

47 “The White City more resembles fairyland than a material creation so wondrously complete is it in detail, so surpassingly beautiful and perfect as a whole,” reported the Charlotte Observer. Whitehaed Kluttz, “The Nashville Exposition” Charlotte Observer, July 4, 1897, p. 4.

54

himself in rail station design, planned six of the main buildings and was the supervisory architect

for the other half.48

Despite the committee’s hope for a uniform architecture it was, in the end, undercut by its

own decisions and budgetary restraints [Figure 2: Cotton States Exposition]. Whereas most

expositions invested their time and money into exposition buildings, Atlanta’s were built in a

roughshod manner. Gilbert in an article for Harper’s commented that as opposed to other fairs

that used wood framing and staff, cost limitations meant that wood and shingle were used for

many of Atlanta’s buildings.49 Many of the buildings also diverged from the exposition’s

Romanesque plan. For instance, local architect Walter T. Downing designed the Art Building in

the Italian Renaissance style. In a bizarre decision the exposition’s Administration Building and

main entrance was given a medieval design. The building was a composite of “old baronial

castles.” The main tower recalled the Rheinstein, while the entrance archway “frown[ed] down

with its deeply embedded windows and loop-holes,” and was entered through a doorway

modeled on “the old door of the bloody tower, a part of the famous Tower of London.” The

corner of the building represented Warwick castle a “magnificent specimen of ancient

feudalism.”50 Gilbert took an almost perverse pleasure in frightening fairgoers as they entered the

exposition grounds: “[A]s the visitor passes underneath the huge iron-spiked portcullis and past

the threatening battlements and turrets, his imagination may cause a rise in his normal

48 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 30. For a more in-depth biography of Gilbert see Bruce Harvey, “World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, 1895-1902,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, Department of History (Nashville, 1998), 115-116.

49 Gilbert was able to see some benefit in this technique: it would advertise Georgia’s yellow pine. Bradford L. Gilbert, “The Architectural Features of the Atlanta Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (September 21, 1895): 892.

50 The Cotton States and International Exposition. Pamphlet. Cotton States and International Exposition (1895: Atlanta, Ga.) – Souvenirs: Cotton States Subject File: Box 2; Folder2. KRC.

55

temperature, and although he may not be able to enjoy the reality as some of us have done, he

will hasten inside to breathe more freely.”51

The twelve buildings of the exposition’s “White City” housed the fair’s departments and

were accompanied by an additional sixteen structures not including the amusements of the

Midway Heights. The twelve main buildings were the Manufactures and Liberal Arts, Fine Arts,

Administration, Fire, Auditorium, Agriculture, Mines and Forestry, Machinery, Negro,

Transportation, Electricity, and Woman’s Building. The exposition also erected the Georgia

Building, whose state constitution “embarrassingly” prevented it from erecting its own

building.52 The additional sixteen buildings represented a hodgepodge of interests. The most

significant of these was the U.S. Government Building, which housed exhibits from the federal

government as well as the Smithsonian Institute. In addition to the Georgia Building,

Pennsylvania, Alabama, Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts constructed buildings to house

exhibits. Despite the exposition’s overtures to Latin America, Costa Rica was the only foreign

country to construct its own building. The East Indian Pavilion accompanied it as the other

foreign exhibit with a separate building. The Plant System of Florida and the Southern Railway

were the two railroads with buildings. Lastly, scattered around the exposition grounds was a

cabin from the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, a “modern school house,” a “modern jail,” and a

chimes tower.53

The hodgepodge nature of the exposition undercut the executive committee’s desire for

order and perfection. While the main theme was Romanesque, the Woman’s, Fine Arts, and

Georgia Manufacturers’ Buildings were more classical than romantic. Although Gilbert’s

51 Gilbert, “Architectural Features,” 893.

52 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 30.

53 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 29-35.

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“modern Romanesque” style was associated with urban design, the exposition’s naturalistic

setting in Piedmont Park and the buildings’ shingled walls muddled the overall plan. The Cotton

States and International Exposition’s appearance confused more than it clarified.54

Compared to the Cotton States exposition the Tennessee Centennial presented a uniform

and architecturally ordered space. If the effect of the Cotton States’ overall plan was to confuse,

the Centennial’s classical buildings and symmetry clarified the fair’s New South vision [Figure

3: Tennessee Centennial Exposition]. The choice of a classical motif emphasized the progress

made by Nashville and the South in the years since the Civil War. Classical architecture also

referenced in the minds of older southerners the decades before the war during which time

planters mobilized antiquity as the basis for a proslavery argument and modeled plantation

houses and public buildings on classical forms. At the same time, while classical architecture

marked the fair’s progress, it also could suggest that when compared to the glories of ancient

civilizations the South might be lacking or even degenerating.55

The Centennial maintained a high standard of cleanliness unheard of in real cities. In

contrast to Nashville proper, the exposition’s White City formed a “heterotopia” in which

southern society’s utopic desires were translated into a present reality.56 However, in the quest to

create a “perfect” city the exposition exposed southerners’ unease with modernity. “[A]cross

54 Harvey, “World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent,” 124; Gilbert, “Architectural Features,” 892.

55 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery, Jefferson Chase, trans. (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001), 48; see also Edwin A. Miles, “The Old South and the Classical World,” North Carolina Historical Review 48 (Summer 1971): 258-275.

56 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics 16:1 (Spring, 1986): 22-27, esp. 26. Foucault used the term “heterotopia” to describe spaces in which humans attempt to present and create a utopia. In Foucault’s analogy one’s vision in a mirror would be utopia, while the mirror itself would be a heterotopia. Heterotopia’s serve as spaces of illusion that expose real space or creates another real space that makes spaces outside a heterotopia look ill constructed and jumbled.

57

from [the exposition], on the other hill, there are changes that mark the presence of human

misery,” wrote Nathaniel Stephenson:

The rolling masses of smoke eddy in and out among the steep slopes of the city, settle

about the base of the Capitol, or stream up upon an idle wind and wrap the Capitol in

grey. They are the banner of the modern city, and the modern city is another name for

woe. All through the pageant of the fair here will abide this double game of hide and

seek—on the one hill, with the light of heaven; on the other, with the dusk of the modern

struggle for existence.57

In late nineteenth century Nashville, notes historian Don Doyle, horse manure “joined by the

garbage, privy fumes, and contributions of assorted dogs, chickens, and hogs, [to create] an

abominable stench on hot summer days. Dead animals were left in the streets for days before

being dragged by the city scavenger to the river to be dumped.”58 The exposition space

proclaimed a modern utopia at the hands of the New South elite, whereas the actual city of

Nashville laid bare the cruel privations of industrial capitalism.

Every night garbage was removed and the Centennial City was equipped with a modern

sewage system that unlike Nashville provided clean drinking water to visitors. In these ways, the

Centennial was to be experienced as the perfect city. Following the path of Chicago’s White

City, the Tennessee Centennial Exposition created a perfect world that was ephemeral. By

presenting a city that ordered and enclosed technology and race, the Centennial allowed fairgoers

to participate in a fantasy world where the dangers and industrial realities of the everyday were

obfuscated. In this fantasy world, fairgoers escaped the constraints and frustrations of daily life

57 Stephenson, Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 7. See also Marks White Handly, “Tennessee and its Centennial” The Century: A Popular Quarterly 54:1 (May 1897): 95.

58 Quoted in Ayers, Promise of the New South, 76.

58

brought on by increasing change and racial instability. Put your faith in the New South, the fair

seemed to say, and the glories of the past will combine with possibilities of tomorrow to create a

future of order and peace, safety and good health.59

The buildings of the Tennessee Centennial matched those of the Cotton States exposition

and other international expositions. There were, however, some differences. Of the main

buildings, Nashville’s Fine Arts Building differed the most as it was held in the Parthenon.

Instead of a Manufactures & Liberal Arts Building, Nashville had a Commerce Building. It also

added three other official buildings in the form of the Children’s, Hygiene and Education, and

History buildings. States that erected separate buildings were Alabama, Illinois, New York,

Texas, Arkansas, and Kentucky. The cities of Cincinnati, Knoxville, Louisville, and Chicago

also erected buildings on the grounds. Shelby County (Memphis) constructed a small-scale

replica of a pyramid to go with its city’s namesake. The only official foreign building was the

Mexico and Central America Building. Peripheral buildings located in the White City included

the Lion Roof Garden Restaurant, a replica of the Rialto Bridge, the Railway Terminal Station, a

Casino, the Knights of Pythias building, a Club House, Photography Gallery, and an emergency

hospital segregated by race. One of the crowning structures of the exposition was the Centennial

Flag Pole, which stood three hundred feet high and built from southern lumber. The exposition

also featured working cotton and tobacco fields.

Because of the long lead-time, the Tennessee Centennial Exposition was a singular

architectural achievement. Despite having ten different architects or firms design the buildings, it

was able to maintain uniformity. The classical style allowed the Tennessee Centennial

Exposition to make claims on its past, present, and future. The nature of the buildings along with

the copious amount of Greco-Roman inspired statutory referenced several histories at once. By 59 Justi, Official History, 98.

59

adopting a classical motif Lewis placed Nashville squarely in the realm of southern, American,

and Western tradition.60 At the turn of the century, classical design made claim to a city’s

modernity. With the beginning of the City Beautiful Movement, uniformity and order with

reference to the classical past was viewed as the epitome of modern city design. As architectural

historian Catherine Bishir notes, “political and cultural elites drew on the imagery of past golden

ages to shape public memory in ways that supported their authority,” presenting a vision of

“stability, harmony, and patriotism.”61

In his Opening Day address, J. W. Thomas made clear the Centennial’s purpose as an

“object lesson” that would inspire the “youth of the land” to “undertake still greater

achievements and strive to reach perfection’s heights.”62 A. G. Brown argued in a Nashville

Banner article that it was time the South devoted itself to “the education of the masses and

communities.” In an echo of Karl Marx, he continued:

[A] revolution is going on in our lives and manners, our habits and opinions, wherever

steam power and electric agencies go, and that these agencies are doing their work in

every quarter of the globe. Old things are passing away, and all things are becoming new

under the influence of forces which disintegrate the past and reveal the future. Dead and

dying rapidly are the many subjects of contention which alienated nations and divide

60 Harvey, “World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent,” 127-130.

61 Bishir connects southern classicism with an argument for Jim Crow modernity: “This architecture provided a compelling metaphor for southern leaders who promoted their region as offering the best of modern reform and race relations combined with the stable social hierarchy modeled after the Old South.” Catherine Bishir, “Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past in Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, 1885-1915” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 200), 141, 157.

62 Justi, Official History, 77.

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parties heretofore, while the social arrangements of men are conforming themselves more

and more to the doctrine of the common brotherhood of all.63

In this world where “every thing that is solid melts into air, everything that is holy profaned,”

Brown suggested that the fair’s “intelligent men and women” go to the Nashville, Chattanooga,

& St. Louis Railway exhibit to “be guided in their efforts to render the surface of the earth a

more pleasing abode for the habitation of rational beings.”64

The exhibits housed in the Manufactures and Liberal Arts/Commerce, Agriculture, Mines

and Forestry, Machinery, Electricity, and Transportation buildings tied directly to the New South

program of industrial and commercial progress. The Fine Arts, Woman’s, and Negro buildings

presented exhibits that outlined paths to cultural improvement alongside the New South’s vision

of a stable social, cultural, and racial hierarchy. The objects contained within these exhibits

became a “set of resources” through which southern fairgoers actively inserted themselves in the

New South vision of the fairs, placing themselves as contributors in its development.65 The

sights, sounds, smells, and haptic qualities of the exhibits were a powerful argument for the New

South. The spectacle and sheer volume of exhibit space and the displays themselves joined with

their ordered and sequential display to allow visitors the opportunity to identify with power: to

see the New South vision as their own and regulate and channel their behavior to best affect its

outcome. This power, as Tony Bennett makes clear, was “manifest not in its ability to inflict pain

but by its ability to organize and coordinate an order of things and to produce a place for the

63 Brown, “Centennial Exposition,” 3.

64 Brown “Centennial Exposition,” 3; Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Penguin Books, 2011); Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin, 1988).

65 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 47.

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people in relation to that order.”66 The Cotton States and International Exposition and the

Tennessee Centennial Exposition were spaces in which southerners, white and black, were asked

to join and contribute to the New South’s “imagined community.”67

Contained within each building were exhibits and displays meant to educate, train, and

inspire. While each exhibit reflected the exhibitors’ desires and intentions they tended to promote

the New South vision of the fairs. The exhibits often contrasted inferior methods and products of

the past with the superior items of the present while suggesting the possibilities for the future.

For instance the Official Catalogue of the Cotton States described the exhibits of the

Transportation Building as creating a teleological history: “There can be seen the slow, tedious

and cumbersome methods employed in ages past, and down through the succession years to our

present time; the contrast causing us to wonder the yet possibilities of the great unknown

future.”68 Exhibits such as these confirmed the path laid out by New South boosters. The past

was “slow, tedious and cumbersome,” the present was better, but the future was filled with

unknown possibilities that could be only achieved through the New South program of

industrialization and social and moral improvement. The exhibits of the exposition’s buildings

operated as “performative resources” meant to program one’s thought and behavior in the task of

securing the South’s modernity. “The character of its exhibits is largely the character of an

exposition,” wrote Walter Cooper in his history of the Cotton States exposition, “and in this case

66 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 67.

67 On the ways in which communities and nations are “imagined” entities see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006 [1991]).

68 The Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. September 18 to December 31, 1895 (Atlanta, 1895), 87.

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they illustrate its purpose and the ideas upon which it is built.”69 The exhibits in each of the

buildings were meant to educate and instruct, “[t]o disseminate knowledge and instruction in all

branches of the arts and sciences that tend to make life more pleasant and comfortable, and to

promote the general welfare of the people.”70

New South spokesmen understood the South’s image problem was based on reality. In a

pamphlet published between the expositions, the Nashville, Chattanooga, and St. Louis Railway

admitted as much: “An impression prevails extensively North, that people of the South are

exceeding ignorant. To a certain extent this is true. The number who can neither read nor write is

a burning shame to the legistation [sic] of the South.”71 While not addressing the literacy skills of

southerners, the expositions did address southern ignorance. Journalist Charles Kindrick reported

back to New Orleans that the Atlanta “exposition is an educational factor for the southern people,

and all should see it who can….The influence of the world’s fair on the taste of the people of this

country is manifest in almost every home.”72 A. G. Brown in the Nashville Banner connected

civilization with the “education of the masses and communities” at the Centennial exposition.73

The Highest Board of Award in Atlanta released a statement saying that “the good of an

exhibition of this kind will be manifested in the improvement of popular intelligence and

industry, in diffusion of correct standards of taste and skill.”74

69 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 73.

70 New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, GA (Albany, 1896), 229.

71 Read What the South Offers, 7. I’ll leave the irony of this sentence to the reader.

72 Charles W. Kindrick, “General Remarks About the Fair” New Orleans Times-Picayune, November 22, 1895, p. 6.

73 Brown, “Centennial Exposition,” 3.

74 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 75.

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Northerners, especially, were interested in the educational possibilities of the expositions.

“The grown folks,” wrote Maude Andrews for Leslie’s Weekly, “will see all sorts of interesting

things at the Government building in the morning—real object-lessons to their ignorant

eyes…What a great education this will be to the farmers cannot be calculated.”75 New South

spokesmen residing in the South’s cities reiterated this view. The Atlanta Constitution in an

article entitled “The Exposition as an Educator” hoped that the “farmers of the south will make it

a point to visit the exposition with their families to the end that they may enjoy the vast benefits

which the great show confers on those who study its various features.”76 The railroad and

business elite behind the exposition wished to demonstrate the South’s progress, while

acknowledging that the region had a ways to go. By both promoting and educating they planned

to kill two birds with one stone.

Within the expositions’ buildings the educational nature of the fairs was made clear. The

Cotton States and International Exposition’s Manufacturing and Liberal Arts Building measured

260 by 351 feet with a floor area of over one hundred thousand square feet, making it the largest

and most imposing building of the exposition. Inside, massive trusses, constructed in graceful

curves, supported the roof, while a raised gallery along the edge of the building’s interior

allowed for more exhibit space as well as an elevated perspective on the crowd below.77 In

Nashville the Commerce Building served the same purpose, and like Atlanta it was the largest

and most imposing of the exposition. At 591 by 315 feet it was almost twice the size of Atlanta’s

75 Maude Andrews, “The Atlanta Exposition” Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated (September 26, 1895): 199.

76 “The Exposition as an Educator” Atlanta Constitution, December 29, 1895, p. 17. See also F.E. Leupp, “The Scope of the Atlanta Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (New York: 14 September 1895): 874.

77 Official Catalogue of the Cotton States, 62.

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building. The dome of the building rose to a height of 175 feet, while its interior featured aisles

and naves outlined by elevated galleries twenty-five and forty-five feet high. These buildings

were cathedrals to commerce. They contained manufactured products from across the globe,

making them a “microcosm of the industries of the world” and presented “conclusive proof of

the progress of mankind.”78 They overpowered, disorienting the visitor in “a maze of beauty and

attractiveness.”79 They erased the processes of production for the products themselves, creating

wonder at the organizational power of the southern elite to produce stupefying technology.80 At

the expositions production and consumption were explicitly linked. They made clear the

consumptive possibilities of industrial capitalism, showing the products that would flood the

South if the region had a more industrial workforce, a steady source of capital, and a modern

people.

The Manufacturing and Liberal Arts and Commerce buildings brought southerners a

global cornucopia of manufactured and commercial goods. In doing so, they presented a New

South that viewed status not simply as one’s place within the community but by what one could

buy and own. It was a South removed from the old bonds of rural communities and replaced by

the disorder and dislocation of the marketplace.81 At the same time, in their overwhelming size

and comprehensive nature, they hid this disorder by presenting a façade of order and control.

Fairgoers may have felt overwhelmed by the buildings at the same time as they were given over

78 New York at the Cotton States, 173. In Nashville the Foreign Section of the building amounted to forty thousand square feet and featured exhibits from Italy, Great Britain, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Russia, France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Canada, China, Japan and Switzerland. Justi, Official History, 333.

79 Justi, Official History, 336.

80 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 81.

81 Ayers, Promise of the New South, 19-20.

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to trust the men who were able to plan and construct them. To believe that the New South vision

of the expositions would bring about this utopia of consumer goods and cessation of wants and

desires.

While the Manufactures and Liberal Arts and Commerce Building presented a world of

commercial possibilities, the expositions’ Agricultural Buildings confirmed the South’s strength

in agricultural production. The exhibits contained within the buildings were more than could be

found at a typical agricultural fair. They presented the New South vision of a diverse and modern

agricultural economy. Measuring 150 by 300 feet with a central dome rising 107 feet, the Cotton

States’ Agricultural Building presented a comprehensive picture of the South. Exhibits featured

the region’s agricultural possibilities, grains and livestock that were raised in the South but also

the commercial products and implements related to agricultural production.82 Its purpose was

twofold. On one hand, the building demonstrated to southerners an agricultural world that moved

away from subsistence and cash crops, to one in which diversified agriculture linked to industrial

production created a southern world filled with wonderful agriculture goods and wares. On the

other hand, it demonstrated the agricultural-based possibilities available for northern investment.

The building contained exhibits like that of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company of Winston,

North Carolina, which featured a display made entirely of tobacco.83 In its exhibit, Reynolds

demonstrated the South’s bounty of tobacco—the entire display could be made of it—while

making clear the productive and consumptive possibilities of the agricultural commodity—the

entire display could be consumed. Other corporations followed Reynolds’ lead and were made

entirely of corn and cereals. Consumption of the products was also encouraged. “Pretty girls in

smart caps, gowns and aprons are in attendance,” reported the New York committee to the

82 New York at the Cotton States, 185.

83 Official Catalogue of the Cotton States, 30.

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exposition, “and liberally supply visitors with samples of their wares, most of which can be

devoured on the spot or carried away without further trouble.”84 Aligning well with the

Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, the Cotton States and International Exposition’s

Agricultural Building presented a South open for business, while giving an opportunity for

southern companies and industries to participate in a tradeshow like atmosphere.

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition’s Agriculture Building took a more didactic tone

than Atlanta. If the Cotton State’s building was to demonstrate the commercial and industrial

possibilities of southern agriculture, Nashville’s building intended to instruct southerners in

modern agricultural practices. The Tennessee Centennial’s Agriculture Building was double the

size of Atlanta’s and featured a central dome of 100 feet with six lesser domes, four of which

surrounded the centre dome. The Centennial’s building originally was constructed by the

exposition company but was later sold to the state of Tennessee when it finally approved an

appropriation for the fair. As a result, the exhibits became more of an advertisement for

Tennessee as place of investment and immigration than originally intended.85 Although the

building contained agricultural goods and wares, it was known for its colossal paintings of

Tennessee agricultural life. These paintings maintained the racial hierarchy of Tennessee

agricultural production. If the black-run Negro Building conveyed the industrial and commercial

possibilities of African Americans, the white-run Agriculture Building made sure to locate them

back in the fields. The most popular and largest painting was that of a cotton field featuring

“negroes at work…the baskets of the pickers standing out conspicuously.” The tobacco painting

was painted in all the shades of the plant and “represented a negro working in a field of

84 New York at the Cotton States, 185.

85 Justi, Official History, 360.

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tobacco.”86 As much as the building advertised the bountiful crops of Tennessee it also

advertised that in the New South, African Americans continued to do the backbreaking work of

the region. In this New South vision old racial hierarchies were maintained and potential

immigrants led to believe that if they came to start a farm they would not be the one’s doing the

hard work of picking the cotton or tobacco. It was an agricultural utopia built on the backs of the

region’s rural African Americans; it was Jim Crow modernity.

Training rural southerners in modern farming techniques, with their reliance on

commercial fertilizers not only would improve overall production but bring southern farmers

under the influence of the region’s business and commercial elite located in Nashville. The

Tennessee Centennial’s Agriculture Department conveyed the need for modern agricultural

techniques and instructed southerners in these methods by locating two cotton and tobacco fields

outside the buidling. Herman Justi noted that the “exhibit was to show what improved methods

of cultivation can do in the increase of the cotton crop.” It was tough to make a go of cotton in

Tennessee so “the intention of this experimental field was to show what improvement might be

made over the present slip-shod methods of cultivation; to demonstrate that upon suitable land,

highly cultivated, with liberal use of commercial fertilizers, it could be made remunerative.”87

Despite the modern nature of the fields, their laborers were distinctly of a traditional form:

African Americans were seen working daily.

Perhaps no building more clearly communicated the idea of progress than world’s fairs’

Machinery Buildings. The machine and technology were central to late nineteenth century claims

of progress and it was doubly important for the South, a supposedly backward agricultural

86 Justi, Official History, 361.

87 Justi, Official History, 363.

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region, to demonstrate its technological prowess.88 Both the Cotton States and Tennessee

Centennial’s Machinery Buildings were imposing structures, each measuring over forty five

thousand square feet and centrally located on the fairgrounds. In both buildings, exhibits featured

displays of machines and technologies from companies and individuals across the South and

nation. They demonstrated the path of progress. In the machines of the age, southerners were

witness to technological development that was to improve their lives and place the United States

on the forefront of human history. “Fires glow in the great furnaces; wheels, big and little, whirl

in every quarter; great leathern belts wind their way about the building; dynamos generate untold

volts of electricity; pumps and lathes, planes and drills are hard at work, all obediently

responding to an unseen but irresistible force, and blending into a comprehensive scene of

activity that stirs the pulses and quickens the brains of the lookers-on,” reported the New York

committee of Atlanta’s Machinery Building.89 In order to demonstrate the perfectibility of a

technological age the buildings themselves erased the smoke and smut of late nineteenth century

industry. At the Centennial Exposition’s Machinery Building all of the power sources, belts and

ropes, smells and smoke behind the machines were contained in a separate building and hidden

from sight. The result was to hide the “unsightly, to exclude artificial heat, and to avoid the smell

of oil…in order that a splendid line of exhibits might be inspected with comfort during the

hottest days of the summer.”90 The reality of industrial progress, then, was obfuscated, the terror

and heat of the nineteenth century factory erased for the comfort of middle class observers.

88 Paul Greenhalgh comments that at world’s fairs the “most frequently suggested vehicle for achieving the goal of progress was technology.” Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 24.

89 New York at the Cotton States, 205.

90 Justi, Official History, 343-344.

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The Electricity Building also contributed to the New South vision of industrial, and

material progress. Electricity in the form of the electric light was still a new experience in the

1890s. Although its use had increased, for many Americans but especially southerners,

electricity was something to be feared. Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s national

magazines carried an ongoing debate weighing the costs and benefits of electrical power.91

Electricity at the expositions contributed to more than lighting the fairs but were a means by

which the experience of electricity was normalized and made safe. John P. Barrett, in charge of

electricity at the World’s Columbian, noted that the fair “brought electricity to the people in the

light of a servant not as an awful master.”92 For the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial

expositions the possibility of using electricity in agricultural production was one of the main

goals of the fairs. Charles Kindrick, who connected electricity with “human progress and human

happiness,” came away from the Atlanta exposition believing that in the near future “farms will

be cultivated, crops harvested and labor performed by electricity.”93 The Atlanta and Nashville

Electricity Buildings in their display of the “rapidity of electrical development” and the

demonstration of the “practical application [of electricity’s] many and varied uses,” made

electricity and electrical apparatuses comprehendible to southerners and suggested the

possibilities of an electric future.

The use of electricity to light up the fairs created wonder and awe as night turned to day

[Figure 4: Tennessee Centennial at Night]. “While the crowd stood wondering with delight,

the wizard had waived his wand, and a scene of enchantment was spread out on every side,”

91 Judith A. Adams, “The Promotion of New Technology through Fun and Spectacle: Electricity at the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Journal of American Culture 18 (Summer 1995): 45-55.

92 Quoted in Adams, “Promotion of New Technology,” 50.

93 Charles W. Kindrick, “Electricity at the Exposition” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 31, 1895, p. 6.

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wrote Herman Justi. “The genius of electricity had been invoked.” Electricity was key to making

the White City into a fairyland as “thousands…were drawn to the Exposition nightly to witness

what experts pronounced the greatest triumph thus far achieved in electrical lighting and

decoration.”94 References to expositions as fairylands, especially at night, were central to making

the new technology feel safe. The idea that the exposition connected to something outside of

reality, a fairyland where the problems of the everyday were removed, allowed “technologies to

be experienced in a relaxed, leisure atmosphere where machines seem to enhance sensory

experience, enrich pleasure, and become servants to human whims.”95 Introduced to electricity

and electric light, all southerners, white and black, urban and rural, were witness to the future at

the Atlanta and Nashville fairs.

In creating an overwhelming display of technology, the expositions tapped into what

historian David Nye calls the nineteenth century’s “technological sublime.” The technological

sublime was the religious feeling aroused by the “confrontation with impressive objects,” it

“emerge[d] from and help[ed] validate new social and technological conditions.”96 The tens of

thousands of light bulbs that lit up the expositions at night were a manifestation of a New South

future in the present, creating an overwhelming argument for the path laid out by New South

boosters.97 Recalling his trip to the Centennial from Monteagle in rural Tennessee, Walter

Morgan remembered the electric lights as one of the defining features of the exposition. Morgan

94 Justi, Official History, 90.

95 Adams, “Promotion of New Technology,”45.

96 David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), xiii, xvii.

97 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial, 53. The fairs did indeed use tens of thousands of light bulbs. For instance the Tennessee Centennial featured 18,000 incandescent lights, 12,000 of which were used only for decorative purposes.

71

also recalled his traveling companion, Ms. Levan, responding when asked what she thought of

the electric lights: “Well honey, I thought I seen the glory of God.”98

While educating southerners in the ideology of progress, the exhibits of the expositions

also trained their bodies in middle class comportments. In Atlanta the Machinery Building

featured an exhibit of “Physical Training and Condition; Hygiene” that contained displays of

“public baths, lavatories; sanitary appliances for ventilation, drainage, sewerage, disinfection.”99

In Nashville, the Hygiene and Education Building featured all sorts of products related to

cleanliness and hygiene. One of the more peculiar and overtly didactic spaces proposed for the

Cotton States exposition was the Model Workingman’s House, which was to be occupied by a

family of four throughout the length of the fair. The purpose of the house and exhibit was to

demonstrate what could be accomplished on an income of five hundred dollars a year. The

cottage was furnished with “all the conveniences and comforts of life” and every day “the head

of the family” received a day’s worth of the five hundred dollars. The Constitution reported that

the “moral of the exhibit will be to show just what amount of comfort and happiness can be

secured from a small income” and that the “display will be watched with great interest and the

poor, as well as the rich, will learn the lesson of economy that is intended to be taught.”100 The

workingman’s house presented the New South vision for a content and servile working class. It

embodied and legitimated the ideology of the region’s mill owners who controlled the space of

mill hands’ living quarters and the factory floor to stem a rising class-consciousness amongst

southern white workers. With the region settling after the Populist uprising of the early 1890s,

98 “Walter Morgan Oral History Interview,” Ann Wells, interviewer (Original Date: 1976-09-16; Digitization Date: 2006-06-01). Tennessee Centennial Project: Oral History, Nashville Public Library, Nashville, TN.

99 Official Catalogue of the Cotton States, 55.

100 “Seeing the Sights” Atlanta Constitution, July 22, 1895, p. 5.

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the workingman’s cottage was a lesson to both the New South middle and working class that the

region would feature a distinct racial and class hierarchy.101

The open spaces of the fairs and congregation of visitors at popular places that

encouraged one’s gaze to pass from the objects on display to each other ensured the visitors

entered an “exhibitionary complex.” Writing of Vanity Fair, Herman Justi reported: “Some are

there merely to see and to be seen, and some merely to see without preference of being known at

all. But the general desire is to be seen, and it was curious how many people who held

themselves most carefully aloof from the mildest sort of a sensation…exhibited sensation

indicating pleasure when told on the streets: ‘I saw you doing Vanity Fair last night.’”102 If they

internalized the lessons of the fair, behaved in an orderly fashion, and trusted their more

educated betters, southerners were told that a capitalist utopia was around the corner.

While most of the buildings contained within the White City outlined the material paths

of progress, the expositions’ Fine Arts Buildings presented moral, cultural, and intellectual

progress. They were also the buildings that made most apparent, according to late nineteenth

century logic, the ways in which the South and southerners lagged behind the North and Western

Europe. At World’s Fairs the Fine Arts Building presented culture as a “hierarchical system,

101 For the ways in which New South mill owners, or “town people,” attempted to control the lives of their workers in a closed and ordered space and for the ways in which mill hands contested and disrupted this order see David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1982), 10-11, 133-153; Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “Disorder Women: Gender and Labor Militancy in the Appalachian South,” Journal of American History 73:2 (September 1986): 354-382; and Jacquelyn Dowd Hall et al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1987), 114-180. On Populism see Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978); and Bruce Palmer, ”Man Over Money”: The Southern Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1980).

102 Justi, Official History, 207.

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separating the high from the popular, the functional from the ethereal and the expensive from the

cheap.” It moved the exposition beyond a “trade fair” and into the realm of culture.103 It was in

the Fine Arts Building that the cultural sophistication of the host city and visitor became

apparent, the place where it was necessary to maintain middle class comportments.

In Atlanta and Nashville it was apparent the degree to which the South lacked in the high

arts. In Atlanta the exhibits of the Department of Fine Arts were classified geographically, four-

fifths of which came from either New York or Philadelphia with nearly one-tenth from France,

the Netherlands, and Italy. The South was barely represented. Cooper in his history tried to make

amends for this by suggesting that many southern artists resided in New York and that in the

South women made up “a large majority of Southern artists” and so their work was placed in the

Woman’s Building. Nevertheless, he could not escape the fact that: “Practically all [the artwork]

came from cities outside the Cotton States.”104

Although positioning its Fine Arts building at the center of its exposition in the

Parthenon, Nashville nevertheless betrayed the degree to which the South lacked a modern high

culture. While Atlanta had difficulty securing the major modern artists of the period, Nashville

was successful in bringing in paintings by Claude Monet and members of the impressionist

school. Theodore Cooley, head of the art department, secured works by the great artists of the

day as well as work by “old masters,” including Raphael and Rembrandt. However, by bringing

a truly credible and international art exhibit to Nashville the lack of southern artists was

noticeable when compared to the preponderance of great European artwork.105

103 Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas, 198.

104 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 77.

105 Art historian Judy Larson is skeptical that all the works of the “old masters” were authentic. Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs: Creating Regional Self-Portraits through Expositions,”

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Despite the lack of southern artists, the expositions’ fine arts buildings were the best

places to inculcate middle class behavior and transfer cultural capital to fairgoers. Beginning in

the eighteenth and extending into the late nineteenth century, high-art was viewed as a way to

improve society.106 The purpose of the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial’s art buildings

was to improve southerners by training their behavior and morals in modern bourgeois society.

Not simply paintings and statues, the exhibits of the art building were “props which the visitor

might utilize for particular forms of self-development.”107 By mingling with the middle class and

observing their behavior toward art, it was hoped that rural and working class southerners would

emulate bourgeois comportments. In doing so, the organizers of the expositions attempted to

transfer cultural capital to the southern masses. French Marxist sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, has

noted that capital as culture can exist in both “embodied” and “objectified” states. Embodied

cultural capital is the “correct” ways one acts in a primarily middle class context. It must be

worked on and is, therefore, linked to self-improvement. Objectified cultural capital, are objects

invested with cultural meaning that allows for the improvement of one’s status. Objects, such as

paintings, transfer cultural capital to their owners. Southern expositions’ fine art departments

pedagogically and didactically attempted to transfer cultural capital to visitors thereby improving

the standard of southern culture overall.108

Various ways were attempted to control and manage fairgoers’ behavior in the art

buildings. In Nashville a special prize was awarded to the best painting as chosen by fairgoers

Dissertation, Institute of Liberal Arts, Emory University (1998): 26, 32; Official Guide to the Tennessee Centennial, 73

106 Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs,” 15-17.

107 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 10, 100.

108 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital” in Cultural Theory: An Anthology, Imre Szeman and Timothy Kaposy eds. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 81-93.

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with the result that it “made many visitors to the Parthenon study carefully…the excellent

collection so admirably placed for such a purpose.”109 Guidebooks and souvenir catalogues

helped explain to visitors the meanings and various schools of paintings. The presence of guides

and greeters made sure that rules prohibiting loud or offensive talk and the touching of exhibits

were enforced. In Atlanta, all canes and umbrellas were to be checked for a fee of five cents to

prevent fairgoers from poking holes in the paintings.110

In addition to this hands-on approach both the Atlanta and Nashville dailies ran amusing

“true” stories of southerners’ ignorance and naïveté of art. Hidden in these comical pieces were

instructions on how to behave in modern spaces. One story poked fun at rural fairgoers who

believed that all the paintings in the Parthenon were painted for the exposition. Another

suggested the value of the paintings to readers by making fun of a man who offered fifty dollars

for one of the most expensive and most popular paintings at the fair. The stories were also

willing to laugh at members of the middle class, indicating the way in which the southern nouveu

riche were still somewhat unsure of themselves. “There came into the building a lady who was

well-dressed and who had a refined and intelligent look,” reported the Nashville Banner. After

spending some time looking at the sculptures and paintings in the Parthenon, she stopped and

asked the attendant: “Will you be kind enough to tell me where the art gallery is?” As she began

to leave she stopped to say: “I want to be somebody’s pardon.” Comical pieces created a sense of

superiority in the reader over their bumbling characters, while at the same time teaching the

proper behavior and reverence required in presence of high culture.111

109 Justi, Official History, 125.

110 Larson, “Thee Southern World’s Fairs,” 21-22; “Mr. Cooley Has a Difficulty” Nashville Banner, August 10, 1897, p. 7.

111 “Heard in the Parthenon” Nashville Banner, October 25, 1897, p. 6. Throughout the length of the Cotton States exposition, the southern dialect humorist, Betsy Hamilton, ran a running gag of

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The expositions combined uplift ideology with the commercialization of the art world in

the late nineteenth century. Herman Justi noted that there were “few public or private galleries in

the South, and the wall of her rich and well-to-do citizens have, until recent years, been almost

bare of fine pictures.”112 The Fine Arts Buildings exposed not only the South’s dearth of artists

but also the lack of sophistication of its most respected citizens. In nineteenth century society the

possession of art signified one’s place in the social hierarchy, the South’s lack of galleries, both

public and private, threatened the expositions’ thesis of southern progress. As a result, the fine

art buildings not only trained fairgoers but also stimulated the commercial art market. In the six

months of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition one hundred and twenty-five works of art,

pictures, and statuary were sold to southern collectors alongside commissions for future work.113

The Tennessee Centennial’s fine arts building went beyond the normal scope of an

international exposition by constructing an exact replica of the Parthenon [Figure 5: The

Parthenon]. While fine arts buildings were essential to assert a cultural hegemony that extended

beyond the realm of trade and commerce, Nashville placed art at the center of its exposition. No

single building was more commented on and discussed than the Parthenon. It was the singular

achievement of the exposition and is still a prominent feature of Nashville’s present-day

Centennial Park. The Parthenon, however, hid a deeper meaning for late nineteenth century

Americans. The New South’s faith in progress and its concomitant fear of degeneration became

a poor white family taking in the sights and sounds of the exposition. In all the stories a valuable lesson could be drawn on how to behave properly in urban space. For example see Hamilton, “Betsy At The Exposition” Atlanta Constitution, October 20, 1895, p. 5.

112 Justi, Official History, 121.

113 Justi, Official History, 121, 126; Larson, “Thee Southern World’s Fairs.”

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saliently entwined in the Parthenon. Looking upon the Parthenon, southerners and Americans

wondered if the Faustian pact of industrial capitalism was worth it.114

The Parthenon stood on an elevated terrace at the centre of Centennial City. Because it

contained the exposition’s fine arts exhibit it was the only fireproof building at the fair. It was

constructed of a stone foundation, concrete floor, brick walls and a glass roof in a steel frame.

Molded staff combined with fifty-eight fluted columns to give the building an exact imitation of

the original exterior of the temple. The Official Catalogue noted that the “sculpture on the

pediments, metopes and frieze, as well as the painting, are in strict imitation of the original, and

furnish an object lesson in classic architecture never heretofore seen in this country.” Two large

doors provided access to the building, while a glass roof let in light. Outside the temple stood a

forty-three foot high statue of Pallas Athene, while inside stood another statue of the Greek

god.115

While the Parthenon was a celebration of the past, it marked the progress of modern

civilization through its “synthesis of the past” and its “prophecy of the future.” Although the

epitome of architecture, the real Parthenon lay in ruins in Greece. In Nashville it was resurrected

to its former glory, demonstrating the power of the present to bring back and make perfect a

wonder of the past. In its collapse of time and space the Parthenon provided lessons for

Americans. “It means, in a word,” wrote A.G. Brown, “that the more we study and imitate the

creations of genius among those who have gone before us, the more we shall fan its flame and

guide its direction to those who come after us.” Through the Parthenon, Brown drew a direct link

between Greek civilization and American, read white, civilization. In the representation of the

temple time did not flow linearly but exploded into the present in a cyclical fashion: “As bees

114 Justi, Official History, 113.

115 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial, 86.

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make the comb the same way in every hive, so civilized man repeats the same ideas, institutions

and construction in the same order of progression forever. That is to say civilizations are alike

and all strive after the same ideals.”116 The Parthenon in Nashville was the South’s statement it

had arrived in the modern world by connecting the city to the glories of the ancient.

In spite of this enthusiasm for the past, many observers saw the Parthenon as a troubling

object lesson of the rise and fall of civilization. To many, the ruins of the original Parthenon

stood as a “monument to the birth, glory and decay of the first great republic.” “Can it be

possible that our modern republic is fast approaching the zenith of its glory,” wondered one

dignitary on Nebraska day. The same dignitary pleaded with the crowd to continue to invest their

time and energy in supporting “our development as a republic” through the practice of their

“moral and intellectual greatness” lest they too become ruins of the past.117 The temple

condemned the modern world as its presence allowed an escape from the “stormy modern

element” by fixing one’s attention on the “majestic simplicity, that sublime union of grace,

dignity, power, which is the genius of the Greek race embodied in the Parthenon.” Some

fairgoers upon confronting the building were led to ask, “What result is all this pageant of

American material progress going forward?”118

116 A.G. Brown, “The Nashville, Chattanooga, & St. Louis Railway,” Nashville Banner, July 21, 1897, p. 6. Brown represented competing visions of time in late-modernity. On the one hand, governments and capital increasing viewed time as a linear end game, while thinkers and intellectuals thought of the ways in which the past ruptured the present. See Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies; Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, Michael Jennings, ed., Howard Eiland, Edmund Jephcott, Rodney Livingston, and Harry Zohn, trans. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2006); and Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Terence Kilmartin, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, Andreas Mayor, trans. (London: Modern Library, 2012).

117 “Great Celebration in Honor of Nebraska at the Exposition” Nashville Banner, October 8, 1897, p. 1.

118 Stephenson, Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 30-32.

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Late nineteenth century Americans of all classes and races did not universally accept the

pace of technological change that the international exposition movement celebrated. Even as

present-time thickened with the simultaneity of electricity and the wireless, Americans looked

increasingly to the past as a site of truth and meaning.119 As Dana Seitler has argued, “the

disorienting experience of modern time—gave rise to a paradox: modernity sought a break with

the past, but that break necessitated the past’s return.”120 The Parthenon represented this paradox.

At the same time, the fairs inculcated a belief in the power of modernity and progress to

transform the South. Fairgoers were made to understand that they were key components in the

region’s industrial and modern future.

The fairs’ dream of the future was neatly captured by a Puck magazine illustration of the

Cotton States exposition titled “The New South—The Triumph of Free Labor” [Figure 6: The

New South]. In the left foreground stands a strong white male worker wearing a sash labeled

“free labor.” He stands with one a foot on a plough while resting on a hammer, surrounded by

bricks and industrial gears. He looks out approvingly at the crowd entering the fair. On the right

side African Americans, dressed in their Sunday best, enter the exposition while paying respect

to a statue of Abraham Lincoln. Behind them two Civil War veterans walk arm-in-arm,

embodying the nation’s reconciliation. In the background is the Cotton States and International

Exposition glowing under a rising sun labeled “prosperity.” Here was the New South vision of a

region remade by industry and modernity: free labor brought prosperity. In this idealized

illustration we see the New South’s dream of the future. While the reality was starkly different,

119 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 36, 68, and 88.

120 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 1.

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the vision of a biracial industrial society was real for the organizers and supporters of the

expositions. At the same time, the illustration in Puck, a satirical magazine published in New

York, suggests the ways in which nonsoutherners did not quite believe the South’s supposedly

free labor would lead to general prosperity for all. For the time being, however, New South

boosters continued to dream.121

Southern expositions, like all international expositions, were not homogenous spaces.

Contained within the exhibits and displays of the White Cities were myriad of complementary

and contradictory belief systems. The fairs looked to the future, while celebrating the past. They

praised the machine, while remaining ambiguous of its true effects. Architecture suggested the

stability and achievements of the past and subtly condemned the modern city. And yet, despite

these contradictions, the South’s expositions attempted a unified vision. The exhibits of the fairs

trained southerners in a particular ontological system: one that celebrated and made few excuses

for the southern past, spread middle class values in the present, and suggested a future utopia in

which a class and racial hierarchy joined to form a peaceful yet powerful South. It created a

uniquely southern teleology of Time and History. As we shall see it was a modernity based on

the segregation of race, a Jim Crow modernity.

121 Udo Keppler, “The New South—The Triumph of Free Labor” Puck 38:972 (October 23, 1895), centerfold.

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Chapter 2. “We Should Show Them What a Separate People Can Do”: The South’s New Negroes and African American Visions of

Progress

“At the national exposition in Chicago…the only recognition that was given to the negro was to take care of the toilet rooms.” – Bishop H. M. Turner, “To Colored People” Atlanta Constitution

“I think that it is time to show them that we, the colored people of the south, have accomplished something—that we are indeed a great people, and that we have a future before us which very

few of them dream of.” – H. R. Butler, “The Colored Exhibit” Atlanta Constitution

“Two surprises were in store for the thousands of visitors who assembled in Atlanta […]. One was the negro exhibit, the other was the exhibit of the negro.” – Alice Bacon, The Negro and the

Atlanta Exposition

On a late September day in 1895 the prominent African American spokesman and

emigrationist booster, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church,

toured the grounds of Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition alongside a reporter

from the Chicago Inter Ocean. Looking at the displays of industry, education, and agriculture in

the Negro Building, Turner commented that he had “no patience with the talk about the new

negro as workman.” Blacks had always done the bulk of the labor in the South and to display

them as workers was nothing new. Instead Turner placed “new negroes” in a different category.

New Negroes were not laborers but African Americans participating in the new world of

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commercial amusements and, far from being a positive force, brought blacks down in the eyes of

whites.1

Upon leaving the Negro Building, Turner and his companion strolled down the Midway.

Stopping in front of the Dahomey Village, Turner remarked: “Here must be the ‘new negro.’”

Confronting the white spieler, Turner demanded to know why, “you white men pursue the negro

to Africa with your lying? You have for years lied about the negro in this country, and now…you

are lying about the negro at home on his native heath.” The spieler demanded to know what this

man could possibly know about Africa to which Turner replied that he had recently spent time in

Africa pursuing missionary and emigrationist causes. Turner assured the gathering crowd that

while West Africans “may be heathens and uncivilized,” they were “more peaceable and gentle

than many of you civilized and enlightened white men here in America.” For fairgoers at the

Cotton States exposition the Dahomey Village was an authentic taste of Africa, but Turner

suggested that the “wild negro cannibals you have here, cavorting around like apes and baboons,

never saw Africa. They are lazy, good-for-nothing negroes from New York, or some other town,

where they have been taught to jump about like monkeys and yell like hyenas, while you tell

these people that they are talking in their native tongue. Stop your lying about the negro!” The

astonished journalist reported that the “crowd shouted, the showman looked stupefied, and the

Bishop walked down the Midway, telling me there was no new negro.”2

H. M. Turner, “To Colored People,” Atlanta Constitution, January 13, 1895, p. 3; H. R. Butler, “The Colored Exhibit,” Atlanta Constitution, April 3, 1895, p. 8; Alice M. Bacon, The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition (Baltimore, 1896), 11.

1 L. W. B., “Is He a New Negro?” Chicago Inter Ocean, September 28, 1895, from “A News Item in the Chicago Inter Ocean,” in Louis R. Harlan, ed., The Booker T. Washington Papers: Volume 4 (Urbana, 1972), 41.

2 L. W. B., “Is He a New Negro?,” 41-42.

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This brief anecdote makes clear the opportunities and spaces opened by the international

expositions for African Americans to confront and challenge the white racial structure of the

region and nation. In the liminal and ephemeral space of the Midway, Turner confronted a white

man and the white race in a crowd of whites. At a moment when the growth of Jim Crow laws

were limiting African American political and social participation in southern society, Atlanta’s

Cotton States and International Exposition and Nashville’s Tennessee Centennial Exposition

gave blacks an opportunity to voice their own narrative of the South’s past, present, and future.

A narrative that often contested the one presented by whites.3

At the same time, African American participation in the expositions demonstrates the

dialogic nature of black identity in the late nineteenth century. Many African American leaders

adopted the rhetoric of progress and Social Darwinism. Far from challenging the methods of

racial science, aspiring blacks challenged its conclusions. The expositions make clear a rising

stratification within the black community and a growing tension among black spokesmen. Turner

was prominent in emigrationist circles, and while he supported the cause of the Negro Building,

he saw the future for African Americans in Africa not America. To the commissioners and

organizers of the Negro Exhibits the future was a different New Negro than the one disparaged

by Turner. In the space of the Negro Building they hoped to demonstrate the progress made since

emancipation. To them the New Negro was educated and well versed in the modern techniques

of agriculture and industry. Exemplified by Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” at

the Cotton States, these black spokesmen located the future of African Americans as a separate

and vibrant race rooted in the South. Lastly, while Turner was wrong about the Dahomey 3 David Guss, The Festive State: Race, Ethnicity, and Nationalism as Cultural Performance (Berkeley, 2000), 8-11. Following the work Mikhail Bahktan, cultural anthropologist David Guss suggests the liminal nature of such events. By allowing African Americans to participate in their expositions, white southerners included blacks in the discursive space of the fair, opening avenues to celebrate and criticize southerners’ interpretations of the past, present, and future.

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Village—the performers really were West Africans—he makes clear a growing divide within the

black community. Some working class African Americans joined the culture industry and its

commodification of black culture as a way to escape the old economies of the South. The

expositions’ Old Plantation amusement, which featured blacks playing themselves in slavery,

suggests the ways in which some African Americans exploited racist stereotypes as a means to

participate in modern and sophisticated art forms. In an era and region in which blacks were

excluded from even moderate paying jobs, working as a minstrel artist offered opportunities to

escape agricultural and manual labor.4

In the face of these multiple performances and representations of blackness, attempts to

present an ordered vision of race at the fairs came “unhinged.”5 As Alice Bacon, a white teacher

at the Hampton Institute, wrote shortly after the Cotton States and International Exposition:

“Two surprises were in store for the thousands of visitors who assembled in Atlanta…One was

the negro exhibit, the other was the exhibit of the negro.”6 The problem for many was which

Negro took center stage.7

4 Karen Sotiropoulos has demonstrated the multifaceted nature of plantation shows and other forms of black minstrel culture. Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge, 2006), 2, 5 (second quotation on p. 5). For similar analysis see Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged But Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson, 2007); and Barbara Webb, “Authentic Possibilities: Plantation Performances of the 1890s” Theatre Journal 56:1 (March 2004), 63-82.

5 Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901-1905” Radical History Review (Winter 1999), 75-114, esp. 102. Kramer argues that the St. Louis exposition’s presentation of a perfect empire became “unhinged” by the performances of colonial subjects at the fair.

6 Bacon, The Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 11.

7 For other works on African American participation at the expositions see Bruce G. Harvey, “World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, 1895-1902,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1998); Judy L. Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs: Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, 1895, Tennessee Centennial, Nashville, 1897, South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition, Charleston, 1901/2: Creating

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At the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions the southern African

American leadership embraced a historical narrative that had as its end a modern capitalist

utopia. This chapter examines the ways in which African Americans adopted a modern persona

and challenged images of blacks as a static and backwards people prior to the Great Migration.

The Negro Buildings’ exhibits of progress and African American fairgoers’ performances of

bourgeois sensibilities presented an image of African Americans as full participants in

modernity, while at the same time confirming a southern racial order that separated black from

white. In doing so, southern black spokesmen and women contributed to the formation of a Jim

Crow modernity, in which African Americans functioned in society as a separate yet modern

people. Jim Crow modernity was not a new idea, it was taking hold across the South, but at the

expositions it was distilled down to a consumable ideology.

Speaking two months prior to the Tennessee Centennial, Richard Hill, chief of the Negro

Department, asserted that southern blacks were on trial, facing “the most severe test as to what

we have done, are now doing, since our emancipation.”8 Demonstrating the industrial, material,

and educational progress of African Americans, the Negro Buildings presented an image of

blacks as a progressive future-oriented people; an image many hoped whites would notice.9 The

Regional Self-Portraits Through Expositions” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 1998); Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 1895 (Athens, 2010); Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, 1984); Walter B. Weare, “New Negroes for a New Century: Adaptability on Display,” in Elizabeth Jacoway, Dan T. Carter, Lester C. Lamon, & Robert C. McMath Jr. eds., The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall (Baton Rouge, 1991), 90-123; Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkeley, 2012); Ruth M. Winton, “Negro Participation in Southern Expositions, 1881-1915,” The Journal of Negro Education 16 (Winter, 1947), 34-43.

8 Herman Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Knoxville, 1898), 196.

9 Fitzhugh Brundage argues that the optic nature of the Negro Buildings was quite intentional. Brundage, “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory,” Journal of American History 89 (March 2003), 1368-1400, esp. 1369.

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buildings’ make clear an engagement with a discourse of progress rooted in late nineteenth

century conceptions of modernity.10 The buildings and exhibits were a direct challenge to an

emerging racial science that suggested blacks were degenerating and incapable of progress.

Frederick Hoffman, the influential actuarial scientist, claimed in 1896 that African Americans’

inherent racial traits and tendencies “must in the end cause the extinction of the race.”11 The

evidence of material and moral progress presented by the Negro Buildings explicitly confronted

these conclusions. For the buildings’ organizers Social Darwinism was wrong on one level; they

themselves were evidence that not all African Americans were degenerating. They did not,

however, question its methods and instead transposed degeneration and primitivism onto

different classes and people.12

The narrative of progress adopted by African Americans at the expositions was

simultaneously liberating and constraining, dialectic and dialogic. Culturally, and perhaps

biologically, the southern black elite argued they were different from Africans and lower class

10 On late nineteenth century conceptions of modernity and progress see J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry Into Its Origin and Growth (New York, 1960 [1920]), 5; Robert Nisbett, History of the Idea of Progress (New York, 1980); Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (35th anniversary ed.; New York, 2000).

11 Quoted in Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 251.

12 The notion that blacks were biologically inferior and degenerating to the point of extinction ebbed and flowed throughout the nineteenth century. In the 1890s a discourse of eventual black extinction was salient in both intellectual and popular circles. See Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1800-1930 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); George Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 228-255; Robert A. Nye, “Sociology and Degeneration: The Irony of Progress” in J. Edward Chamblerin & Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. (New York, 1985), 49-71; Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minneapolis, 2008); Nancy Stepan, “Biology and Degeneration: Races and Proper Places” in J. Edward Chamblerin & Sander L. Gilman, eds., Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress. (New York, 1985), 97-120.

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blacks. The expositions’ Dahomey Villages and other displays of atavistic blackness made clear

the advancement of Africans in America to both black and white visitors. In comparing

themselves to “primitive” people, black spokesmen simultaneously embraced the science of

Social Darwinism while separating themselves from other people of color who had yet to

progress to the level of the black middle class. African American fairgoers, like the Negro

Buildings, performed a definition of blackness that was linked to the narratives of progress

presented at the South’s expositions. The ability for some blacks to perform modernity separated

them from others who failed to adopt a modern persona. Those who successfully navigated the

fair established themselves as “New Negroes” with a fully modern persona that suggested their

ability to transcend history and enter the ranks of a progressive middle class.13

The organizers behind the Negro Buildings were drawn from the South’s black elite. In

Atlanta the building’s commissioners consisted of well-known African American spokesmen

from each state in the region.14 On the other hand, Nashville’s Negro Committee was a local

13 In her study of W. E. B. Du Bois’ photographic exhibit of middle class African Americans at the Paris Exposition of 1900, historian Shawn Michelle Smith detects a “counter archive” that contested the scientific image of blacks and the logic of biological racism and eugenics. This chapter avoids Smith’s binary notion of a “counter archive,” preferring instead a dialogic model. Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W. E .B. Du Bois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004): 44l. Writing on Meta Warrick’s “Negro Tableaux” at the 1907 Jamestown Exposition, Fitzhugh Brundage has come to a similar conclusion: “Warrick’s work…was not a counternarrative per se but instead fit easily with the prevailing grand narrative of social progress and upward mobility (for whites).” Brundage, “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux,’” 1371-72. See also Weare, “New Negroes for a New Century.”

14 The Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition (Atlanta, 1895), 134. The Negro Commissioners were as follows: I. Garland Penn, Virginia, Chief; Booker T. Washington, Alabama; Rev. A. E. P. Albert, Louisiana; Jesse Lawson, District of Columbia; M. M. Lewey, Florida; G. V. Clark, Tennessee; W. H. Crogman, Georgia; R. J. Perkins, West Virginia; Isaiah T. Montgomery, Mississippi; W.A. Hawkins, Maryland; J. B. Middleton, South Carolina; W. H. Stewart, Kentucky; W. C. Coleman, North Carolina; N. W. Cuney, Texas; Rev. W. O. Emery, Arkansas.

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affair with the city’s black elite and middle class forming the building’s brain trust.15 The Negro

Commissioners and Committee members’ occupations consisted of ministerial, entrepreneurial,

judicial, medical, and educational positions.16 Despite absent from the official discourse of the

fair, African American women also made their presence felt. Black women contributed to many

of the exhibits in the Negro Buildings and meetings of women’s organizations, including the

National Association of Colored Women, raised their profile.

Rooted in New South cities, these elite men and women went beyond the aspirational

middle class identified by historians Michelle Mitchell and Kevin Gaines. Through their

economic achievements they participated in status building institutions and events such as the

Negro Committees. They were the living embodiment of the progressive spirit of the Negro

Buildings. Their participation in the representational ventures of the expositions helped to

reposition the discourse on black progress in the late nineteenth century South. They imbibed the

spirit of the southern New Negro and embraced American bourgeois values that formed what

Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham has called the “politics of respectability.” These elite men and

women defined African American identity on behalf of the black community. In doing so, they

presented a vision of African Americans that emphasized racial solidarity, while embracing an

15 Justi, Official History, 195. The Nashville Negro Executive Committee was a follows: Richard Hill, Chief; W. L. C. Mosely, Secretary; Rev. R. B. Vandervil; Bishop M. B. Salter; Thomas Tyree; Dr. F. A. Stewart; J. H. Petway; Rev. C. H. Clark; W. H. Key; Dr. W. A. Hadley; Rev. James A. Davis; S. H. Sumner; S. A. McElwee; Rev. Preston Taylor; Samuel A. Walker; W. S. Thompson; W. T. Hightower.

16 The members of the Negro Committee for the Tennessee Centennial Exposition who appear in H. F. Kletzing’s Progress of the Race were exclusively drawn from these occupations. Kletzing, Progress of a Race (Atlanta, 1898).

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accommodationist approach to racial inequality that confirmed economic and cultural

stratification amongst southern blacks.17

We should be careful, however, of condemning elite and middle class African Americans

for their accommodationist rhetoric and adoption of white standards of behavior. While

accommodationism may look like a poor strategy, for fin de siecle blacks it opened doors to

criticize the white power structure and was a means to assert their rights as American citizens.

Southern whites, moreover, did not uniformly accept accommodation and many believed that

even “separate fingers” were too close. Booker T. Washington faced threats throughout his

career from those who thought his position on social and economic rights was too radical. In the

end, the Negro Buildings presented a vision that aligned well with Jim Crow South. Blacks were

willing to progress as a separate people without immediate social equality. At the same time,

they created a separate space within southern society that allowed them to critique and contest

the white south.18

African Americans at the expositions exemplified two complementary definitions of

modernity: the belief in material, moral, and economic progress on the one hand, and the

participation in a new commercialized public culture on the other. That different members of the

race performed these definitions simultaneously and separately suggests the ambiguity of an

17 On late nineteenth century African American elite and middle classes see Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 14-17; Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Race Destiny After Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10; Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 187. See also Martin Summers, Manliness and its Discontents: The Black Middle Class & the Transformation of Masculinity, 1900-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and Allison Dorsey, To Build Our Lives Together: Community Formation in Black Atlanta, 1875-1906 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004).

18 Robert J. Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009): 13.

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“Afro-modernity” in the late nineteenth century.19 While the white middle class was free to

participate in commercial culture, many African Americans were wary of being associated with a

culture that traded in stereotypical images of blacks as licentious buffoons. African Americans at

the expositions, then, held a variety of complementary and contradictory goals. They offered

accommodationist rhetoric alongside images of race pride and critiques of the South’s racial

system. They challenged the conclusions of Social Darwinism without questioning its methods.

Blacks at the fair embodied multiple identities that elided perceptions of a homogenous and

united people. The Negro Departments provide a window to a moment when the Jim Crow South

became fluid at the very same time it was solidifying outside the space of the fairs. To a moment

when blacks were given an opportunity to present their own version of the nation’s past and

present and to put forth their own dream of the future alongside whites. In the end, the Negro

Buildings presented a vision that aligned well with southern whites’ version of a Jim Crow

modernity. Black spokesmen were willing to progress as a separate people without immediate

social equality. At the same time, they created a separate space within southern society that

allowed them to critique and contest the white South.

When it was announced that the nation would gather in Chicago in 1893 to celebrate the

four hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas, many African Americans were

excited to present their progress and history at the great exposition. Before the World’s

19 The concept of a unique “Afro-modernity” has been explored by a number of scholars. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora” in Deilip Parameshwar Gaonkar ed., Alternative Modernities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 272-298; Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); and Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

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Columbian Exposition opened it gates, however, African Americans were made to understand

that there was no place for them at the national celebration. The exposition’s executive

committee squashed plans for a separate black exhibit and encouraged blacks to submit

individual exhibits to the all-white committees of their respective states. Unsurprisingly, few

black exhibits made it past the committee stage.20

Outraged at being denied an opportunity to present African American achievements

before a national and international audience, Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells published The

Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. The pamphlet—

handed out to fairgoers at the exposition’s entrance—made clear the treatment and

discrimination faced by blacks, while outlining African American progress and development in

America. In the end, the exposition’s management conceded to black demands for representation

by granting them a “Jubilee” or “Colored People’s Day.” This time Douglass and Wells split on

whether blacks should participate in the token day. Douglass, then serving as United States

minister to Haiti, supported the day and took the opportunity to address the nation from the

Haitian pavilion. Calling on the world to “[m]easure the Negro,” Douglass forgot that there were

few opportunities at the exposition to “measure” blacks, especially as less than one thousand

African Americans attended the day. Whites were free, however, to examine caricatured blacks

on the fair’s Midway or view Africans and other people of color at the ethnological villages that

lined the exposition’s “avenue of nations.”21

20 Rydell, All The World’s a Fair, 53.

21 For African American participation in and reaction to the World’s Columbian Exposition see Rydell, All the World’s Fair, 52-55. Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells-Barnett eds., The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not In The World’s Columbian Exposition, Robert Rydell ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). While African Americans were largely excluded from the World’s Fair, there was nevertheless a black presence. Lacking a cohesive presence, blacks made their presence known; whether in the form of laborers or in the exhibits made by Wilberforce, Hampton Institute, and Atlanta University. It is important to note, however, that

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It was not unprecedented for African Americans to be excluded from the Columbian. The

1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition was the first major American fair to deny African

American participation. Only one official exhibit was devoted to blacks: a statue by a white

sculptor, entitled “The Freed Slave.” The statue featured an African American male holding up

the Emancipation Proclamation with chains broken at his feet. In addition to the statue, the

African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church asked to display an exhibit. The AME was denied

an exhibit but allowed to erect a statue of its founder under the condition that it would be

removed sixty days after the fair closed. Even Frederick Douglass was nearly excluded from the

fair. Chosen as a dignitary for the opening day ceremonies, Douglass was refused entry by a

police officer who believed that a “Negro” would not be invited to participate. Luckily for

Douglass, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York happened upon him arguing with the officer

and vouched for him. A full year before the official end of Reconstruction it was clear that

African Americans were not thought of—in reality or symbolically—as a part of the nation.

Despite participating and playing key roles in the founding of the United States, African

Americans were denied the opportunity to contribute to its national celebration in Philadelphia.22

Due to its position as the largest and most important southern city in the 1880s, New

Orleans was more inclined to allow the participation of its large black population at the 1884-

1885 World Cotton Exposition. Using a logic that was repeated in Atlanta and Nashville, the

directors viewed African American inclusion as a way to convince northern visitors that the

despite their limited inclusion, contemporary African Americans viewed the Columbian Exposition as an exclusionary space. Christopher Reed, All the World is Here!: The Black Presence at White City (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000).

22 Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration & Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 120-121. On African American participation at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition see Philip Foner, “Black Participation in the Centennial of 1876” Phylon 39:4 (4th Qtr., 1978): 283-296.

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South possessed an answer to the “Negro question.”23 The director of the exposition, E. A.

Burke, also extended the fair’s educative mandate to the region’s African Americans. Burke

hoped to “reach out our hand to our brother in black; to shed upon that unfortunate race the

sunlight of science and invention, and implant in him the desire to come out of the slough of

ignorance and make a manly effort to occupy with us the improved farm, the workshop, and the

factory.” It is unsurprising that the first great exposition in the South sought to inculcate modern

progress in what it viewed as its most deprived and debased citizens.24

Blacks from around the country took great interest in the World’s Cotton Exposition.

Robert Rydell notes that coming after the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, “many blacks regarded the

Colored Department at the New Orleans fair as noteworthy for existing at all.”25 For the first

time at an exposition, a department run by African Americans was to present a black vision of

progress to the nation and world. Moreover, many blacks at the exposition were not content to

simply display their progress: they were determined to confront the white power structure of the

region and nation. At the exposition, blacks made clear their “broad demands for political,

economic, and social justice.”26 In their addresses, African American leaders spoke of the need

for a united vision and a response to discrimination across the nation. At the same time, each

concession was allowed to determine its own racial policy. The buildings erected by southern

states, for instance, denied African Americans entry. Protesting an Illinois exhibit for Atlanta’s

Cotton States exposition in 1895, John C. Buckner, a black representative in the Illinois House,

declared that at the New Orleans exposition’s southern buildings the “blackest Hottentot was

23 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair , 74.

24 Quoted in Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 82.

25 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 80.

26 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair , 81.

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welcome, while colored citizens were denied admittance.”27 At the exposition a color line was

maintained for African Americans only. Not given a separate building, the New Orleans’

exposition served as a trial run for the larger and more prominent displays of the Atlanta and

Nashville expositions.

Despite the heady days of the early Reconstruction period by the 1890s African

Americans had witnessed their civil and social rights erode. With the powerful and often violent

reassertion of white Democratic control of the South’s state legislatures in the 1870s and 1880s,

African Americans were increasingly on the outside looking in. The 1883 Civil Rights Cases and

the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision effectively condoned segregation, political discrimination,

and removed federal oversight of the South’s racial affairs. Having lost the right to vote in most

southern states by the 1890s, African Americans were subjected to a violent policing of an oft-

ambiguous color line. Jim Crow laws ensured blacks unequal treatment in public spaces, while

whites used the manufactured specter of the rape of white women as an excuse to lynch over one

thousand African Americans between 1890 and the end of the century.28 With what rights they

had won after the Civil War gone and their social and political lives increasingly regulated and

policed, African Americans’ strategies of resistance fragmented on a number of lines. This

fragmentation was most saliently seen in the animosity between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T.

27 “Illinois Is Coming” Atlanta Constitution, June 8, 1895, p. 1.

28 One thousand one hundred and eleven African Americans were lynched between 1890 and 1899. “Lynching in America: Statistics, Information, Images.” University of Missouri-Kansas City, School of Law. http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchstats.html. Accessed October 2010. For a discussion of lynching in the New South see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

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Washington at the beginning of the twentieth century. In the 1890s, however, African Americans

were more likely to divide over regional and class lines than ideological ones.29

Given the spotty history of black participation in international expositions and the

legal/political discrimination of the Jim Crow South, it was a great surprise to many blacks (and

whites) to hear of their inclusion in Atlanta’s Cotton States and International Exposition only two

years after being denied in Chicago. Two years later, Nashville’s Tennessee Centennial

Exposition prominently featured a Negro Building. These exhibits were meant to convey to the

nation the good relationship between the races in the South. New South spokesmen in the 1890s

understood that the region suffered bad publicity; black leaders, such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett,

had demonstrated the horrors of lynching to a national audience. Many northerners, while

sympathetic with the white South, still harbored reservations about the treatment of blacks.

Knowing that the national spotlight was on their cities and the acknowledged need to attract

29 On African American life in the Reconstruction and Redemption periods see Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1928); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Thomas Holt, Black Over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979) & Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998); Neil R. McMillen, Dark Journey: Black Mississippians in the Age of Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989); Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Dis-Enfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Joel Williamson, The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); and C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South: 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951). On the lives of Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois see Louis R. Harlan, Booker T. Washington: The Making of a Black Leader, 1865-1901 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972) & Booker T. Washington: The Wizard of Tuskegee, 1901-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Robert Norrell, Up From History; and David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: Volume I & II (New York: H. Holt, 1993 & 2000).

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northern capital south, organizers used the Negro exhibits as a way to confirm the South’s

supposed racial harmony and demonstrate its ongoing uplift of southern blacks.30

The inclusion of African Americans at the Cotton States Exposition was partly to attain a

federal appropriation for a government exhibit. The committee consisting Abram L. Grant,

Wesley J. Gaines, and Booker T. Washington went before Congress to solicit funds for the fair.

Supported by Representative Murray, a black congressman from South Carolina, the committee

pushed for an appropriation on the basis that Atlanta would be the first exposition to allow the

full participation of African Americans.31 In their speeches the four men highlighted both the

race pride and the accommodationist rhetoric consistent with many southern black leaders.

Gaines argued that the exposition would “give his race an opportunity to make an exhibit of its

development and progress,” pointing out that the opportunity had been denied in Chicago

“because Congress and the Northern people were afraid it would offend the South and drive

away patronage.” Grant, likewise, reassured Congress that while blacks intended to demonstrate

their development and progress, it would not lead them to the North. “The negroes and the

30 Walter G. Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated: Including The Official History of the Exposition (Atlanta, 1896), 8; Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 193. George Fredrickson, following the work of C. Vann Woodward, emphasized the paternalistic nature of New South boosters and their embrace of African American progress. Fredrickson noted: “When [Henry] Grady [and other New South boosters] pointed to the Negro’s progress with optimist pronouncements about race relations, he was plainly contributing to the image of a South that was peaceful, progressive, and endowed with a dependable labor force, an image that would have appealed to Northern investors while appeasing Northern humanitarians” (215-16). This image was exactly what the South’s exposition organizers hoped to convey. George Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind. See also Paul M. Gaston, The New South Creed: A Study in Southern Mythmaking (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1970): 117-150.

31 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 24. Historian James Campbell notes that Gaines was “one of black America’s leading apostles of the New South creed” and a good friend of Washington. James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 86.

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whites understood each other,” Grant suggested, “and the South was the negro’s home. There he

was going to stay.”32 Months before Booker T. Washington implored southern blacks and whites

to “cast down their buckets,” Atlanta’s black leadership was assuring northern whites that no

matter their economic or political progress blacks belonged and would stay in the South.33

The final word of the session went to Representative Murray whose support of a separate

Negro department suggested an inclusive vision of the nation and American civilization. “The

colored people of this country want an opportunity to show that their progress,” spoke Murray,

“that the civilization which is now admired the world over, that the civilization which is now

leading the world, that the civilization which all the nations of the world look up to and imitate,

the colored people, I say, want an opportunity to show that they, too, are part and parcel of that

great civilization.”34 Having reassured Congress that their vision of progress would remain

geographically located in the South, the appropriation was approved with an amendment that the

Exposition “provide a separate building for the Negro Exhibit, instead of locating it in the

Government Building, as had been proposed.”35

From the point of view of the expositions’ organizers the Negro Building represented a

new era in the region’s long and troubled history of race. When Washington, Gaines, and Grant

went before Congress they threw their support for a southern racial ideal in which African

32 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 24.

33 Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery, William L. Andrews ed., (New York, 2008), 128-129.

34 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 27.

35 Walter Cooper, the exposition’s official historian, concluded: “Undoubtedly, [the Negro committee’s] presence and the assurance of a Negro exhibit did much to secure the appropriation.” While Nashville organizers never officially credited the Negro Department for federal funding, it can be safely assumed that they took notice of the lesson of Atlanta. Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 28, 7-8.

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Americans lived apart from southern whites but jointly strived with them to advance the region’s

industrial and material progress. Central to this vision was the New South desire for an industrial

workforce consisting of blacks and the region’s poor whites. The Negro Building represented the

extent to which southern whites viewed African Americans as an industrial race. While the day’s

racial science believed African Americans to be strictly rural workers unable to participate in the

industrial economy due to their supposed tropical race traits, New South boosters understood

them as necessary cogs in a future industrialized South. This vision contrasted with the lived

reality of African American laborers who were confined to agricultural status or were trained as

outmoded artisanal workers for the new industrial economy. By taking part in an industrial

exposition they suggested other possibilities. The Negro Building illustrated the way in which

white urban elites supported the technical education of the majority of African Americans, while

conceding that some blacks may achieve a status that was objectively similar to that of the best

educated whites. It is important to remember, however, that because the expositions were

illustrative of hoped desires reality often conflicted with the vision of the fairs. If at the

expositions there was a suggestion of advancement on the technological level, many New South

devotees looked at skilled industrial labor as whites-only occupation.36

The Governor of Georgia, William Yates Atkinson, declared that nothing was “more

instructive than in the marvelous progress shown in every line by this emancipated people in

their own building, designed by their own architect and contributed to and controlled solely by

their own race.”37 Walter Cooper, in his history of the Atlanta exposition, viewed the Atlanta

36 Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 71. See also David Carlton, Mill and Town in South Carolina, 1880-1920 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1982).

37 Hon. W. Y. Atkinson, “The Atlanta Exposition,” The North American Review (October 1895): 392.

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Negro Building as illustrative of the ways in which African Americans had surpassed their

“natural” limitations to achieve material and moral progress, while giving credit to southern

whites for supporting industrial education.38 White commentary on the Tennessee Centennial’s

Negro Building struck a balance between black progress and white paternalism: “The white race

of the South has generously and wisely aided the Negro race to solve the problem of self-help,”

proclaimed a pamphlet for the Centennial, “and it is pleasant to note that many Negro leaders

have met the advances of their former masters in a gratifying spirit of thankfulness and have

utilized the advantages afforded them with surprising intelligence.”39 The fairs’ organizers

viewed the Negro exhibits as illustrative of a developing Jim Crow modernity, in which African

Americans became a modern and progressive people but remained indebted to southern white

paternalism. Blacks would progress on white terms, becoming modern but locked in the region’s

racial hierarchy.

The Negro Buildings served another purpose. They illustrated that the South had wrought

order out of the supposed disorder of the Reconstruction period. For New South boosters the

Negro exhibits were illustrative of the abject failure of Reconstruction, that “the Negro” was

naturally inferior to whites, and that it was a mistake to let non-white southerners control the

region’s future. It was “unjust on behalf of the negro to put him in places of power for which his

ignorance made him absurdly inadequate,” proclaimed the official history of the Cotton States.40

Governor Atkinson suggested that the Negro Building was proof that the Reconstruction

experiment of equality was a failure as “God never tried to make [the Negro] the equal of the

38 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 57.

39 Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition (Nashville, 1897), 20. Microfilm Reel 128, No. 6. SNMAH.

40 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 57.

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white man.” The building demonstrated the paternalistic largesse of white southerners and

Atkinson welcomed “all mankind to visit us and witness both the problem and process.”41 In

demonstrating a peaceful and ordered relationship between the races and making clear blacks’

material and moral progress, the South’s international expositions provided a counterpoint to the

longstanding argument over whether the United State should abdicate its “responsibility for

southern race relations.”42

For the exposition organizers the Negro Buildings and exhibits were indicative of the

South’s modernity. When placed in a racial hierarchy in which black inferiority was taken as

fact, white paternalism in support of black progress created an image of a benevolent and caring

white South. While the reality was starkly different—by the start of the Cotton States exposition

eight African Americans had been lynched in Georgia that year—the image of a progressive

white and black South was essential to demonstrate the region’s modernity. Although blacks may

have lagged behind white southerners, the fact that they were progressing materially and morally

was solid evidence of the South’s modernity as a whole.43

The extent to which northern visitors accepted this vision of a Jim Crow modernity was,

however, uneven. While some northerners praised the South’s handling of the race question as

evidenced by the “peaceful relations” of the expositions, others were left unconvinced.44 A

reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle noticed that while there was some of degree of equality at the

exposition, outside the liminal space of the fair, southern blacks continued to face “ostracism.”

41 Atkinson, “Atlanta Exposition,” 393.

42 Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 1895 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 12.

43 Fredrickson, Black Image in the White Mind, 215-216. See also Gaston, The New South Creed (1970): 117-150.

44 New York at the Cotton States, 278-79.

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“The negro is barred from many places [in Atlanta],” he reported back to New York. “The old

distinctions are slowly fading and breaking down, but it will be many years before the negro is

admitted his real freedom.”45 While the Brooklyn Eagle reporter hoped that the old distinctions

would “fade,” they only hardened in the years following the exposition. Southern expositions

demonstrated the compatibility of racism and modernity and Americans were quick to adopt the

South’s Jim Crow modernity.

Lastly, a separate Negro Building fit with the late-nineteenth century’s “search for order.”

The building took its place alongside the Children’s Building, the Woman’s Building, the

Manufacturing Building, the Liberal Arts Building, the Government Building, and the Fine Arts

Building. In the nineteenth century the presentation of an ordered worldview in the form of

museums and expositions became a form of cultural power.46 Beyond the racist dictates of

whites, the categorizations of the expositions’ buildings were evidence of the South’s modernity.

Spaces such as expositions allowed visitors to insert themselves in a particular vision of history

and society—one that separated black from white. The South’s expositions, in their systems of

classification, positioned fairgoers as flâneurs who used the “performative resources” of the fairs

to shape their behavior and “cognitive horizons.”47 The Negro Building, while certainly

consistent with Jim Crow was also indicative of a new governmental logic. It demonstrated to

45 Handbook to the Cotton States and International Exposition: Being a Faithful Account of What a Representative of the Brooklyn Eagle Saw When He Visited the Fair (Atlanta, 1895). Microfilm Reel 126: 3. SNMAH.

46 Tony Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 2; Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876-1926 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 33. See also Robert H. Wiebe, The Search For Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).

47 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 10. See Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006): 72.

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outsiders that the South was not a primitive hodgepodge ruled by irrational racial instincts but an

ordered and harmonious society that enclosed race and put it in its proper place.48

The black leadership of Atlanta and Nashville, despite some early reservations, rallied

behind the Negro Exhibits viewing them the best way to demonstrate the advancement of

African Americans in the South. The exhibits were drawn mostly from black institutions focused

on agriculture and technical education. And while the separateness of the buildings was not

without controversy, those seeking to demonstrate the progress of African Americans as a

separate but vibrant race generally approved of them. On a practical level, the Leavenworth

Herald, a black newspaper from Kansas, argued that a separate exhibit was needed because if the

Negro Exhibit was dispersed among the white exhibits blacks’ progress “would go wholly

unnoticed by the visitors at the fair.”49 The separate nature of the building was a source of race

pride for the Herald: “Some object to Negroes exhibiting because we all have a separate

building. We ought to have a separate building. We are American citizens, but we are a separate

and distinct race. We would to God that we were more ourselves, more united in ideas and

actions and would stop being ‘white.’”50 Black spokesman and Atlanta pharmacist H. R. Butler

echoed the sentiment in the pages of the Atlanta Constitution: “Why is it that at this late hour we

are raising this kick about being separated? Why I am glad of it, I say that we should take

advantage of this opportunity and go into this work with our whole souls. We should show them

48 Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 23. John Cell has argued segregation was in fact a modern and rational system. Cell, The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

49 “Atlanta Exposition,” Leavenworth (Kansas) Herald, February 9, 1895, p. 2.

50 “Untitled” Leavenworth (Kansas) Herald, March 9, 1895, p. 2.

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what a separate people can do.”51 With the reality of Jim Crow settling in, many blacks in the

South were willing to embrace separation, viewing it as an opportunity to demonstrate the

abilities of the race and exhibit race pride.

The Negro Building at Atlanta’s Cotton States exposition was located in the southeast

corner of the exposition away from the fair’s main entrance [Figure 7: Cotton States Negro

Building]. It was not, however, hidden.52 The building was, in fact, at the busy Jackson Street

entrance to the exposition park. At twenty-five thousand square feet it was one of the larger

buildings on the grounds and was erected by two black contractors at a cost of ten thousand

dollars.53 Chief of the Negro Department was I. Garland Penn, a school principal from

Lynchburg, Virginia. Born two years after the Civil War, Penn, due to the support of his parents,

attended both grammar and high school. Following his studies, Penn took a teaching job in

Virginia, rising to the position of principal. Prior to taking his position as chief of the Atlanta

Negro Department, Penn was most well known for compiling a history of African American

journalism entitled The Afro-American Press and Its Editors. Twenty-eight years old at the time

of the Atlanta exposition, Penn embodied the spirit of the southern New Negro. He was

educated, proud of his race, and willing to work with whites to ensure the maintenance of civil

51 Butler, “The Colored Exhibit,” Atlanta Constitution, April 3, 1895, p. 8. Like many African Americans involved in the exposition movement, Dr. H. R. Butler was a “self-made” man. Born in North Carolina in 1862, Butler worked a variety of jobs while taking night classes. Eventually he attended Lincoln University and Meharry Medical College where he earned his M.D. At the time of the Atlanta exposition, Butler was running a successful pharmacy and drug company. Rev. E. R. Carter, The Black Side: A Partial History of the Business, Religious and Educational Side of the Negro in Atlanta, Ga. (Atlanta, 1894), 136-138.

52 Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 23. Perdue argues that the Negro Building’s peripheral position signaled its marginal status. Significantly, she notes that the building did not appear in some of the birds-eye renditions of the exposition.

53 I. Garland Penn, “Awakening Of A Race: The Moral and Industrial Development of the Negro as Shown at the Exposition,” Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1895, p. 24.

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and social rights. Penn also placed himself at the top of an increasingly stratified racial hierarchy.

More educated than his slave born parents and more sophisticated than the black sharecroppers

surrounding Lynchburg, Penn saw it as his moral duty to uplift his race, while maintaining a

distinction between himself and members of the black working class.54

The entrance to the Negro Building featured an allegorical pediment that told the story of

black progress. On one side of the pediment was a depiction of a slave mammy in 1865 with a

one-room log cabin, a log church, a rake and basket. On the other side was Frederick Douglass

accompanied by a comfortable residence, a stone church and, what Penn described as, “symbols

of the race’s progress in science, art and literature, all representative of the new negro in 1895.”

In the center was a plow and well-fed mule. According to Penn, this represented the freedom of

African Americans from slavery: “for the colored man today plows his field, while thirty years

ago he without almost an exception plowed for another.”55 A romantic image given the number

of blacks ensnared in the South’s system of sharecropping and debt peonage, it nevertheless

made clear the explicit race pride of the building and its confrontation with white stereotypes that

cast blacks as indolent.56 The first image encountered at the Negro Building was a progressive

allegory of African American life in America.57

54 I. Garland Penn, The Afro-American Press and Its Editors (Springfield, 1891); Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 58. Penn’s “The Progress of the Afro-American Since Emancipation” was one of four contributions to The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not In the World’s Columbian Exposition. Penn, “The Progress of the Afro-American Since Emancipation,” The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not In The World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 44-64.

55 I. Garland Penn, “Awakening Of A Race: The Moral and Industrial Development of the Negro as Shown at the Exposition,” Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1895, p. 24.

56 For an analysis of sharecropping and the extent of debt peonage in the South see William Cohen, At Freedom’s Edge: Black Mobility and the Southern Quest for Racial Control, 1861-1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991); Pete Daniel, Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York, 1979); Edward Royce, The Origins of

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Upon entering the building the visitor was met by a large statue of a black male in

loincloth with broken chains around his wrists. Under the statue was the motto: “Chains broken,

but not off” [Figure 9: Chains Broken Statue]. The statue, like the pediment, was viewed as an

allegory of progress. Indeed, the New York commission to the exposition reported that “if the

present rate of progress is maintained for twenty-five years to come, it needs no optimism to

predict that the chains will have entirely disappeared and little, if any, trace remain of their have

been worn.”58 Likewise, in his Negro Day address, black reverend J. W. E. Bowden, interpreted

the statue’s muscular and powerful frame to be the “new Negro.” “What is he doing?” asked

Bowden, “He is thinking! And by the power of thought he will think off those chains and have

both hands free to help you to build this country and make a grand destiny of himself.”59

In many ways the statue referenced the popular late eighteenth and early nineteenth

century abolitionist image of a praying slave, pleading: “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” As

historian Johan Stauffer notes, the “Am I Not a Man and Brother?” figure was “the best-known

white abolitionist image” of the nineteenth century.60 While the image of the kneeling slave

maintained the African American body as servant and supplicant to God and whites, “Chains

Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

57 In The Atlanta Exposition and South Illustrated the pediment’s progressive vision is made clear: “The bass-relief design over the entrance shows the old log cabin, mule and plow; the companion piece, a neat, modern Negro’s home, church and a design showing the arts which the Negro has now mastered.” The Atlanta Exposition and South Illustrated (Chicago, 1895), 30.

58 New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, GA. (Albany, 1896), 198.

59 Rev. J. W. E. Bowden, “An Appeal to the King,” 7-8.

60 Johan Stauffer, “Creating an Image in Black: The Power of Abolition Pictures” in W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed., Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890-1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 66-94, esp. 70.

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Broken But Not Off” was a powerful reimaging of the slave figure. Muscular and standing the

statue asserted that African Americans were no longer supplicant servants but an independent

people reliant on themselves. That the statue retained his chains was a reminder that although

slavery’s chains may have been broken its longstanding effects—poverty, discrimination, and

exploitation—continued to be worn by African Americans at the end of the century.

The exhibits of the Negro Building were largely educational and agricultural. The first

display came from the District of Columbia [Figure 9: DC Exhibit]. It consisted of art and

statuary as well as some “principal patents by colored inventors on record in the Patent Office.”

It featured portraits of Douglass, John M. Langston, Blanche K. Bruce, and Commissioner Jesse

Lawson by the black painter Daniel Freeman. Three statues by W. C. Hill dominated the exhibit:

a bust of Frederick Douglass, “The Obstinate Shoe,” and “The Negro With Chains Broken But

Not Off.” Photographs showed the black public schools of Washington. Turning right and

heading down the west aisle one viewed a photographic exhibit of the Presbyterian Board of

Missions for Freedmen. The next exhibit was from the State of Virginia with the Hampton

Normal and Agricultural Institute occupying twelve hundred square feet of space. The Hampton

exhibit showed “the department of literary and academic work, mechanical drawing…plans and

measurements of houses actually erected by students of the school.”61 The Virginia exhibit also

featured the first African American savings bank. In the southeast corner of the building was the

Alabama exhibit. It consisted of an industrial display by the State Institution, the Branch Normal

and Industrial school and an agricultural exhibit by African American farmers. Following

Alabama were the Tennessee displays. Central Tennessee College, Fisk University, Roger

Williams, Knoxville College and the Le Moyne Institute made up the exhibit. Maryland’s

display was dominated by Morgan College and was located near the building’s four thousand 61 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 60.

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square foot restaurant and café, which was “patronized liberally by both races without the

slightest friction.”62 The Georgia exhibit was so large that it occupied both sides of the eastern

aisle. In it, Clark University, Atlanta University, Atlanta Baptist Seminary, Spelman Seminary,

Morris Brown College, Georgia State Industrial College, and Gammon Theological Seminary all

made “exhibits of superior quality in industry.”63 The last noteworthy feature of the building was

an exhibit that displayed the opposite of progress. Tucked away in a corner was a representation

of the “other extreme of the race” marked “Uncivilized Africa,” featuring “crude manufactures”

that represented the “uncivilized natives, the heathens of that country.”64 As will be seen, black

spokesmen behind the Negro Building took great care to provide object lessons that made clear

the progress of African Americans.

The Negro Building’s reception was generally positive in both the white and black press.

“Most of the exhibit space,” wrote the Atlanta Constitution, “is devoted to the educational

displays in this building, and for that reason the exhibits are not gaudy and conspicuous as they

are in other buildings.”65 Likewise, the Leavenworth Herald reported: “The ‘Negro building’ is

not only one of the largest, but one of the most attractive, and it is all their own. Everybody goes

to see it, and all white visitors, Northern or Southern speak of it as a revelation.”66 There were,

however, dissenting voices. Charles Kindrick writing in the New Orleans Times Picayune was

unimpressed with the displays of African American progress. Kindrick argued that the Negro

Building showed that “the negro has simply been carried along by a motion he could never

62 Dr. Hammond, “A Race Triumph,” Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade, November 23, 1895, p. 1.

63 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 60-61.

64 L. W. B. “Is He a New Negro?,” 40.

65 “Down in the Negro Building,” Atlanta Constitution, September 29, 1895, p 13.

66 “Negro Day,” Leavenworth Herald, December 28, 1895, p. 2.

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generated” and that the exhibits were mostly by “negroes who have white blood in their veins.

The real negro has little to with the exhibit.”67 For other observers the Negro Building was the

defining building of the exposition. The Times Picayune, in contrast to its reporter, contended

that as the “Eiffel tower was the striking feature of the Paris exposition, and as the Ferris wheel

was the particular unique thing remembered at Chicago, the negro exhibit and the negro building

will constitute the striking and novel feature of the cotton states exposition.”68

Coming two years after the Cotton States exposition, the organizers of the Tennessee

Centennial Exposition did not forget the lessons of Atlanta and included a Negro Building on the

exposition grounds [Figure 10: Centennial Negro Building]. In the promotional material for

the exposition the Negro Building featured prominently. A pamphlet circulated prior to the fair

promised that the building would “illustrate the progress of the race in America from the old

plantation days down to the present time. The colored people of Tennessee will thus have the

greatest opportunity ever offered them to demonstrate the history of the past and the hope and

possibilities of the future.”69 The Freeman also came out early in support of a Negro Exhibit in

Nashville. “This exposition promises to be a repetition of the Atlanta affair,” reported the paper,

“which did more good in bringing the races in close relationship than anything that has happened

in a quarter of a century.”70 The Official Catalogue of the exposition highlighted the Negro

67 Charles W. Kindrick, “The Negro Building at the Exposition,” New Orleans Times Picayune, October 22, 1895, p. 12.

68 “The Atlanta Exposition,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, September 19, 1895, p. 2.

69 “All Roads Lead to Nashville,” (Nashville, 1897), Microfilm Reel 127, No. 15, SNMAHL.

70 “The Tennessee Exposition,” Indianapolis The Freeman, November 28, 1896, p. 4.

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Building as the most “beautiful building on the grounds” and that it was “well worthy of a visit

by all interested in the progress of the Negro since the days of slavery.”71

In charge of the Negro Department was Richard Hill. Hill, the son of “Uncle Jim Hill” a

slave fiddler and prompter who played at the balls and parties of Tennessee’s “best families,”

was also the city’s superintendent of black schools. For the fair’s directors Hill was a symbolic

“milestone in the history of the race to show how far up or down it has traveled in the journey of

life.”72 According to historian Bobby Lovett, Hill’s occupation “brought him into black

Nashville’s middle class and to the fringes of its elite Negro circle.” It also made him dependent

on the city’s white patronage system.73 This is significant as Hill replaced the first chief of the

department, the nationally prominent Nashvillian James C. Napier who resigned citing health

concerns, although his resignation letter suggests that he was in disagreement with the

representation of African Americans at the fair.74 With the contentious Napier out of the way,

Hill, a confirmed follower of Booker T. Washington, set out to demonstrate the industrial and

educational progress of African Americans in the South.

Two years after the Atlanta exposition and a year after the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling, the

Tennessee Centennial Exposition opened to a nation where the stakes were raised for black

participation at a national event. It is clear that in two short years blacks’ fortunes in the South

had shifted significantly and much of the race pride on view in Atlanta was absent in Nashville.

71 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition: May 1st to Oct. 31st 1897 (Nashville, 1897), 57.

72 Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 193.

73 Lovett, African-American History of Nashville, 236.

74 “Letter to the Executive Committee of the Tennessee Centennial Company City,” Napier, James C. – Correspondence – Feb. 24, 1890-August 31, 1896. James C. Napier Papers (Fisk University Special Collections, Nashville). See also Lovett, African-American History of Nashville, 236.

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Gone were the busts of Douglass and Sumner, the allegorical sculptures, and pictures of progress

and race pride, in their place was a far more accommodationist vision. Whereas the Atlanta

exposition had been defined by Booker T. Washington’s “compromise,” the Nashville Negro

Department chose W. H. Councill as their representative. Councill, one of the most prominent

African American spokesmen of the day competed with Washington for white patronage. Going

beyond a level of acceptable pragmatism, Councill supported whole-heartedly the white

nationalist rhetoric of the South.75

At a speech for the laying of the cornerstone for the Negro Building, Councill

emphasized the friendly relations between the two races and claimed that African Americans

“received much more from slavery than did the slave-holders.”76 An accommodationist in the

extreme, Councill nevertheless saw the building as an opportunity to demonstrate African

American progress and confront white racism. During the same speech in which he emphasized

black fidelity, Councill responded to whites’ racism:

Negro history has solved the negro problem from the negro side. There still remains the

Caucasian problem. In view of what the negro has done for this country, in view of what

the white man has done for the negro, will the white man continue and enlarge the work

of encouragement to the struggling race; or will he use the shotgun instead of the Holy

75 William Hooper Councill was Washington’s great antagonist in the 1890s. Born a slave in North Carolina and later brought to Huntsville, Alabama by slave traders, Councill quickly rose in stature following emancipation. A Republican during Reconstruction, Councill changed allegiances with the Democratic rise to power. He was a favorite of white Democrats as he never ceased to embrace a historical vision that aligned well with white-nationalist ideology. Robert Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge, 2009), 87-88.

76 Justi, Official History, 195-198.

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Bible; the bloody knife instead of the spelling book? These are the problems of Caucasian

brains.77

Southern African Americans, even those favoring accommodation, conceived of the Negro

Building as a space of resistance, a place where an accommodationist rhetoric opened the door to

a critique of the white racial system.

For the southern African American elite, the exhibits and displays of the Negro Buildings

were to add up to a convincing vision of African American progress. “We only ask for the

opportunity,” wrote a manager for the Negro Department in Nashville, “and we will show to the

world that we are enterprising and progressive, skillful and energetic, and alive to all interests

and possibilities concerned in this great American Commonwealth.”78 Speaking at Alcorn A &

M College in Lorman, Mississippi, Atlanta Negro Commissioner Isaiah T. Montgomery—

founder and one time mayor of the all black town of Mound Bayou, Mississippi—encouraged

the school’s students to participate in and contribute to the Cotton States Exposition.

Montgomery argued the Negro Building’s exhibits “will tend to show to the world and to

ourselves the depth from which we have come: the height to which we have ascended, and our

grand possibilities in the future. In these will appear the true relations that we sustain to the

moral, industrial and social life of this great country.”79 A demonstration of modern progress was

central to late nineteenth century claims to civilization. Through the Negro Buildings, African

Americans marked their participation in a conversation over the limits and boundaries of

77 Justi, Official History, 195.

78 Chas. H. Stewart, “The Negro’s Day,” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 5, 1897, p. 1.

79 Isaiah T. Montgomery, “A Commencement Address” Indianapolis The Freeman, August 17, 1895, p. 2. For more on Montgomery see Janet Sharp Harmann, The Pursuit of a Dream (New York: Vintage, 1981).

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civilization. By making clear African Americans’ progressive nature, they laid claim to

American modernity.

I. Garland Penn also hoped that exhibits would make clear to whites a cultural hierarchy

within the black community based on one’s adoption of American bourgeois values. Penn

suggested that the Negro Building showed that not all blacks were “like the indolent, indifferent

and loud-mouthed class who give us such a bad name and that the progressive negro, such as will

be at the exposition with his progress, is entitled to a different treatment than the low class,

thriftless and filthy negro.” By demonstrating the ability and progress of the black middle class,

Penn argued through the exhibits of the Negro Building that whites must recognize their rights.

“If from the showing the new negro makes at the exposition he succeeds in securing the full

measure of his rights he will be better able to lift his race up,” Penn told a white reporter. “As it

is in some cases the bad negro receives as good treatment as the good negro and the latter has

nothing to point him to without, as an evidence that man who respects himself will beget to

himself his rights.” Demonstrating the split nature of uplift ideology—claiming to uplift the race,

while separating oneself from a lower order—Penn intended the Negro Building to demonstrate

to “both races that African Americans are a progressive people” and hoped that the exhibits

would “stimulate the race in its progress.”80

The Negro Buildings’ demonstration of African American industrial progress confronted

head on a burgeoning racial science that linked race with industrial achievement. White racial

theorists in the 1890s developed a theory of “industrial evolution” that cast industry as a racial

accomplishment. Blacks, it was argued, could not become an industrial race due to their tropical 80 “The New Negro At Our Show,” Atlanta Constitution, July 28, 1895, p. 4. Penn’s rhetoric demonstrates the way in which the black leadership attempted to shift their discourse of race from biology to culture. Black elites were not asking for universal equality. Instead, equality was reserved for those who had properly assimilated to white society. See Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 21.

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race traits, which prevented them from withstanding the demands of industry.81 As Hampton

educator Alice Bacon noted, as whites in the North and South reconciled after the war, “a feeling

of indifference to the negro on the part of the Northern whites” had grown. “Travellers [sic.]

looked out of their car windows at Southern railway stations and saw black loafers lounging on

the platform, noticed the primitive agricultural methods, the worn-out farms, the girdled trees in

the gloomy tracts of dying forest, the log cabins…and concluded that the negro was hopeless,

incapable of progress, if not actually retrograding.” The buildings’ display of industry and

progress combated prevalent theories of blacks’ degeneration on the American continent.82

Confronting a scientific landscape that classified them outside modernity, African

Americans challenged such images not by invalidating the science but denying its conclusions.

History was progressive, African American spokesmen concluded: some races and people were

destined to be left behind. The Negro Building presented a vision that African Americans who

were “frugal, thrifty, and intelligent,” who were educated, had “natural gifts, put their time to

good use, accumulating something, have good homes, and are refined in these homes,” were not

on the losing end of modernity’s progressive narrative.83 By demonstrating blacks’ adoption of

bourgeois values and industrial and material progress, the Negro Building contended that African

Americans, of a certain standing, were a part of American civilization. “[A] few more of these

Southern Expositions,” wrote a school principal from Greenville, Mississippi, “will roll back the

81 For discussion of the ways in which class and industry became racialized into a theory of “industrial evolution” see Daniel E. Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

82 Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 6; For the ways in which northerners lost interest in southern African Americans see David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001).

83 “The New Negro At Our Show,” Atlanta Constitution, July 28, 1895, p. 4.

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mist and the educated and refined, the thrifty, and industrious Negro will be seen as a brilliant

orb, making his way athwart the heavens of progress and civilization.”84

The Negro Buildings positioned southern African Americans within the pervasive logic

of evolutionary progress and were spoken of in explicitly evolutionary terms by both white and

black observers. The official history of the Cotton States Exposition claimed that the Negro

Exhibit “was a sociological study, an ethnological fact marking the progress of an important

branch of the human race under circumstances not hitherto existing.” In the eyes of white

southerners the “gigantic experiment” of freedom as evidenced by the exhibits forecasted the

future not just for African Americans “but of many more millions of the same race on other

continents.”85 Whites at the expositions took on the role of the detached scientist observing

blacks’ evolutionary progress and blacks for the most part provided them with the evidence.86

The displays of technological achievement by African Americans at the Negro Buildings

were important object lessons to demonstrate their civilizational progress in evolutionary terms.

The object lessons of the buildings fit nicely with late nineteenth century scientific conceptions

of progress and challenged scientists who put all people of African descent at the bottom of a

civilization-evolutionary scale.87 For the elite African Americans who viewed themselves as

84 Lizzie C. Williams, “The Athens of the South,” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 26, 1897, p. 1.

85 Cooper, Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 57.

86 The Constitution reported in January of 1895 that the proposed Negro Building would arrange its exhibits so that the “various stages of progress of the race may be illustrated to the visitors. The various exhibits will be placed in their proper sequence and relation to each other, and the casual visitor may note the progress of the race as step by step it moved up to the present.” In the end, the Negro Committee abandoned this evolutionary sequence. “Progress of a Race,” Atlanta Constitution, January 20, 1895, p. 17.

87 Baker, From Savage to Negro, 45.

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fulfilling an evolutionary narrative, the exhibits in the Negro Departments were object lessons of

the progress made in their evolutionary development. The Negro Committee in Nashville made

this explicit when they stationed John Tevi, a native of West Africa, on the steps of the Negro

Building. Tevi’s purpose was to talk “entertainingly of the contrast between the American Negro

and the Dahomean.”88 John Tevi was the perfect object lesson for the building’s linear narrative

of racial progress. Like other artifacts of the past, Tevi made clear the advancement of the

African in America to both black and white visitors. The African American leadership at the fairs

frequently made use of such object lessons to illustrate their progress.

At the Cotton States Exposition fairgoers could visit a supposedly authentic Dahomey

Village and an Old Plantation. The Tennessee Centennial replaced the Dahomey Village with

Tevi but also featured a plantation amusement.89 Both of these amusements denied people of

African descent coevality. The Dahomey Village represented West Africans as primitive people

not far removed from the Stone Age [Figure 11: Dahomey Village]. The Atlanta Constitution

stressed the Dahomeans’ primitive state, frequently referring to their nudity.90 West Africans

were visually dissected in the press to demonstrate their primitiveness and evolutionary

88 Quoted in Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs,” 149.

89 The lack of a Dahomey Village at the Tennessee Centennial is likely due to the Dahomeans’ treatment at the Cotton States Exposition. In early January a mob of armed West Africans attempted to take the life of a concessionaire on the Midway. Since the end of the exposition the Africans had not been given anything to eat. Apparently, the concessionaire could not feed them because he had lost most of his money between the San Francisco and Atlanta expositions. The Times-Picayune reported: “The condition of the savages is deplorable. They say they have had nothing to eat except bread for several days and because of their rude huts and thin clothing they have suffered a great deal from the cold of the past few days.” It is unsurprising, then, that the “Dahomey Village” did not make it to Nashville. “Riot On the Midway,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, January 3, 1896, p. 1.

90 Upon their arrival to the exposition grounds the paper described them as “black and savagely nude.” “Her Gates Ajar,” Atlanta Constitution, September 18, 1895, p. 2.

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inferiority.91 Such displays of foreign primitivism allowed southern white fairgoers to measure

their race and their nation’s supremacy.92 For the Negro Committees such atavisms could be

devastating. Indeed, many white fairgoers did not draw hard distinctions between the Dahomey

Village, the Negro Building, and African American fairgoers. Maude Andrews in the

Constitution reported that a Dahomean dance made her “think of a negro laborer scattering corn

in the field.”93 Given the way in which all people of African descent were lumped outside of

civilization, it is unsurprising that black laborers working on the Atlanta exposition’s grounds

attempted to break in and confront the Dahomeans when they first arrived at the exposition.94

African American laborers, whose status was precarious in the New South, were eager

not to be lumped in with the atavisms of the Midway. For those blacks placing themselves atop

an intra-racial hierarchy, such atavisms bolstered their claims to progress. Atavisms confirm

modernity by establishing its difference to and break from the past. As literary critic Dana Seitler

notes, “atavism is not just an abjected form of modern life, a sign indicating modernity’s Other;

91 Maude Andrews, “This Is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, December 8, 1895, p. 6; “A Day At The Fair,” Atlanta Constitution, September 27, 1895, p. 9.

92 Borrowing from Johannes Fabian, Loren Kruger writes, “The power of civilization as idea and ensemble of practices…depended on a paradoxical relation between modern citizen-spectator and colonial other; late 19th century anthropology…recognized the ‘primitive’ as our ‘contemporary ancestor’ while at the same time denying their ‘coevalness’ by assigning the primitive to a relic of prehistory rather than modern time.” Loren Kruger, “ ‘White Cities,’ ‘Diamond Zulus,’ and the ‘African Contribution to Human Advancement’: African Modernities and the World’s Fairs” TDR: The Drama Review 51 (Fall 2007), 19-45, esp. 21.

93 Andrews, “This Is Woman’s Busy Day,” 6.

94 The Atlanta Constitution reported: “The arrival of the Dahomeyites caused great consternation among the negroes at work on the grounds, and they attempted to break through the gates enclosing the strange people several times during the day.” “Her Gates Ajar,” Atlanta Constitution, September 18, 1895, p. 2.

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rather, it is an operation that makes modernity possible.”95 For African Americans concerned

with evolutionary development, the Dahomey Village confirmed the modernity of the black elite.

While many white visitors expected to find the Negro Department filled with a “rude and

barbarous race,” The Broad Ax, a black newspaper, reported the opposite: “[A]ll such [fairgoers]

were pleasantly disappointed; on the contrary they had the opportunity of beholding a

characteristic Dahomey village, placed in contrast with the achievement of the race, in

civilization, in literature, in industrial lines, in finances and in high arts.”96 Echoing the

Constitution’s views of West Africans, The Broad Ax reported that “[t]he village representing the

lowest savage life of darkest Africa, with its half-clothed, unkempt natives, proves a wonderful

contrast with the surrounding evidences of culture and refinement of the American negroes.”97

African American fairgoers were also taken aback by the primitiveness of the West Africans.

“An educated, well-dressed, beaver-hatted negro man pauses in the promenade,” wrote Maude

Andrews in Leslie’s Weekly, “to frown disapprovingly on this musical expression of real African

sentiments.”98 It was clear to the black elite that the Dahomeyans were not modern; they were

outside civilization.99 Anthropological comparisons such as these confirmed the Negro

95 Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies, 26.

96 “The Colored Race at Atlanta,” Salt Lake City The Broad Ax, December 7, 1895, p. 1.

97 As a conciliatory note, The Broad Ax did give the Africans some credit: “The exhibit also contains many things from Africa, showing what the race is capable of even without the aid of high civilization.” “The Colored Race at Atlanta,” Salt Lake City The Broad Ax, December 7, 1895, p. 1.

98 Maude Andrews, “The Atlanta Exposition,” Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated (September 26, 1895), 199. Given Andrews racial predilections this story was probably meant to be humorous in that the sophisticated African American observed a difference between himself and Africans that did not exist. Nevertheless, it does offer a glimpse into how the African American fairgoer responded to the Dahommey Village.

99 Frederick Douglass had asserted as much two years earlier in The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not In the World’s Columbian Exposition. Douglass complained that while African

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Building’s narrative of progress. Standing side-by-side with Africans, African Americans

believed whites would surely see they were a modern people. The black elite transferred the

image of black primitiveness from themselves to Africans.

African American reaction to the Dahomey Village makes clear the complicated

relationship between southern blacks and the ongoing colonization of Africa in the late

nineteenth century. On the one hand, the village confirmed black advancement in the Americas.

On the other hand, the white press’ collapsing of the distinction between Africans and African

Americans compelled black visitors to reimagine their connections with Africa. As Jim Crow

tightened its hold on the South, emigrationists like Henry McNeal Turner suggested that African

Americans could fulfill their destiny as a separate and distinct race outside of the United States.

At the same time, the Negro Buildings’ contrast to the primitive depictions of West Africans

undermined the emigrationist cause, helping to explain Turner’s outburst at the start of this

chapter. The Negro Buildings’ support of a Jim Crow modernity located in the South forestalled

a need to immigrate to Africa. African Americans could become a strong and separate people

within the South. Their relationship to Africa was to uplift Africans. In this way, the Negro

Buildings aligned well with the African American missionaries of the period who, as historian

James Campbell notes, viewed the “uplifting their benighted brethren as an opportunity for

African Americans to demonstrate their own relative progress and thereby advance their claim to

full American citizenship.”100 Emigrationists like Turner, who placed the future of African

Americans were denied participation in the Chicago fair, Dahomeans were there “as if to shame the Negro, the Dahomians are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.” Douglass was concerned that the Dahomeans, who he implied were not “Negro” nor “civilized,” would transfer their savagery onto African Americans in the eyes of whites. In this way, Douglass both contested and confirmed the discourse of civilization prevalent at the World Columbian Exposition. Douglass, “Introduction,” Reason Why, 13.

100 James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 144.

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Americans in Africa and not the United States, were left out of the New Negro paradigm made

clear by the exhibits’ displays of modern progress and contrast to the atavism of the Midway’s

Dahommey Village.101

The Old Plantation, like the Dahomey Village, maintained the atavistic nature of people

of African descent. However, rather than locating blacks’ primitivism on foreign soil, the Old

Plantation suggested that contemporary rural blacks were outside modernity. If the racial

harmony of the Negro Building was to convince northerners that southern whites had a humane

answer to the “Negro Problem,” the Old Plantation eased northerners’ minds that the proper

place for blacks was the South.102 For southern whites the Old Plantation was a piece of

nostalgia. Here blacks were not part of a foreign country but a foreign time. The Tennessee

Centennial’s official catalogue described the amusement as an entertainment that “consists of a

representation of home scenes on the Old Plantation as it was before the war.” It confirmed that

the “participants are negroes altogether, and their songs, dances, cakewalks and stump speaking

are interspersed with music on the banjo, crap-shooting scenes, and all the events of the happy

days long gone. It is not minstrel entertainment purely, but an effort to show the sunny side of

the olden times, and the innocent, joyous amusements of a time that has passed away. And which

is only remembered by the older men and women of the South.” Plantation shows borrowed from

both the popular minstrel stage and the anthropological exhibits to depict a folkloric isolation

that helped relieve the new urban middle class’s unease over modern civilization. In the end, the

101 On Henry McNeal Turner’s complicated and sometimes tortured logic for African American emigration see Campbell, Middle Passages, 123, 133-134. Elsewhere Campbell calls Turner’s thoughts “a curious amalgam of racial chauvinism, evangelical Protestantism, and Social Darwinism.” Campbell, Songs of Zion, 81.

102 The 1901 Buffalo Pan-American Exposition’s guide emphasized the ‘southerness’ and ‘authenticity’ of the Old Plantation act. Richard H. Barry, Snap Shots on the Midway of the Pan-Am-Expo at Buffalo (Buffalo, 1901), 126.

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Old Plantation was a cross between popular plantation shows like the South Before the War

(1892) and Nate Salsbury’s Black America (1895) and living anthropological exhibits like the

Dahomey Village.103

In a performance of remembrance white southerners put blacks in their place. The Old

Plantation played with well-circulated stereotypes of blacks as a happy-go-lucky people and

undercut the seriousness of the Negro Building.104 Maude Andrews, writing for Harper’s

Weekly, explicitly connected the Old Plantation to the Dahomey Village presenting a vision of

blackness that crossed time and space. “Real negroes are on the platform before us,” Andrews

noted, “dancing wildly, and singing in that queer crooning animal way that always makes one

look about for the wild beasts of Kipling’s jungle stores. Not very different in their movements

and voices are these darkies, who have lived all their lives amid civilization, from those wild

103 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition: May 1st to Oct. 31st, 1897, 161. Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 101; Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 22-23. For an uncritical description of Black America that nevertheless gives insight into the appearance and performance of plantation shows see Roger Allan Hall, “‘Black America’: Nate Salsbury’s ‘Afro-American Exhibition,’” Educational Theatre Journal 29:1 (March 1977): 49-60.

104 The way in which the caricatured images of blacks could undermine the Negro Building was made clear during President McKinley’s visit to the Tennessee Centennial. The Baltimore Sun reported: “The most amusing incident of the visit occurred while the President was passing through the Agricultural Building. He had just visited the Negro Building and listened with evident pleasure to the singing of rare old plantation melodies and jubilees by the Jubilee Club of Fisk University. The President was still talking of this wonderful performance when his progress was suddenly blocked by the appearance of twenty or thirty colored people, dressed in the most grotesque and characteristic costumes imaginable, who began to sing some improvised verses about ‘Bill McKinley and his last great race.’ When they concluded the song with a hilarious buck dance the President’s efforts to maintain his dignity failed him and he broke into a hearty laugh.” No matter the extent of progress exhibited by African Americans at the expositions they would continue to be undermined by popular stereotypes that positioned them as humorous sideshows. “Exposition’s Climax,” Baltimore Sun, June 19, 1897, p. 7.

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creatures in the Dahomey Village.”105 For southern whites the village was proof that the dreams

of the Negro Building was simply black fantasy.

Although it is easy to dismiss the Old Plantation as another representation of the racism

found at expositions, contained within the performances of its actors was a multi-vocality that

incorporated “hidden transcripts.” The Old Plantation was one of the few spaces to perform a

new commercial modernity that was absent from elite black discourses of high culture and

hidden from the eyes of whites. Combining racist images with modern identities and pleasures,

the black actors of the Old Plantation connected the South with the ascendant commercial

modernity of the northern metropolises.106 While whites interpreted the “songs, dances,

cakewalks and stump speaking…interspersed with music on the banjo,” as the “events of the

happy days long gone,” to black fairgoers such entertainment could be seen and heard as

something far different.107 The “weird and guttural sounds” accompanying the “scraping of the

fiddle and the old banjo,” would be familiar to some blacks not as anachronisms but as modern

sounds that spoke of the alienation of life in the Jim Crow South.108 Quartet signing and the

cakewalk came directly from late nineteenth century African American cultural sites and were

105 Maude Andrews, “The Midway at the Atlanta Exposition” Harper’s Weekly (November 23, 1895), 1109. In her diary of the Columbian Exposition, Emma Allensworth of Nashville also connected the Dahomean to African Americans’ supposed racial traits: “They are like the negro in laziness too. It was about one’ o’clock when we went in and nearly all were lying around sleeping, smoking and talking.” Emma H. Allensworth Diary, #3214-z, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

106 Historian Karen Sotiropolus has demonstrated the multifaceted nature of plantation shows and other forms of black minstrel culture. Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 2. For the way in which black public culture contained “hidden transcripts” see Robin Kelley’s re-working of James C. Scott’s idea in Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York: Free Press, 1996).

107 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition: May 1st to Oct 31st, 1897, 161.

108 Justi, Official History of Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 209.

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popular among working class black folk.109 Compared to the performances of the Fisk Jubilee

Singers at the Negro Building, the syncopated rhythms of the Old Plantation presented a

sophisticated sound grounded in the here-and-now realities of racial oppression, exploitation,

and commercial possibilities. Such rhythms and sounds would, by the early twentieth century,

come to define the sonic landscape of modernity. Far from a premodern people locked in a rural

economy, then, the southern black performers of the Old Plantation were a modern people

exploiting the racist undercurrents of American society to their own advantage even if middle

class whites and blacks only heard primitive rhythms and sounds. Not simply a white fantasy the

Old Plantation was an entertainment on the forefront of modern commercial entertainment.110

Even though blackface and minstrel amusements carried hidden transcripts to black

audiences, they also constrained the actors within popular and damaging stereotypes. On the one

hand, the freedom from nineteenth century musical standards led to the development of blues

and rag and jumpstarted the careers of African American artists. On the other hand, the Old

Plantation made clear the way in which the black elite could lose control of a defined image of

blackness in the anarchy of the consumer marketplace. The Old Plantation, Dahomey Village,

109 Webb, “Authentic Possibilities,” 70-73.

110 Based on evidence from other plantation shows and late nineteenth century amusements we can be certain that the sounds of the Old Plantation were not simply white fantasy, but the real and developing sounds of African American popular music and culture. Webb, “Authentic Possibilities,” 65; Miller, Segregating Sound. For the way in which plantation and black-performed minstrel shows reflected real African American cultural articulations see Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me’: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues” in Ramblin’ On My Mind: New Perspective on the Blues, David Evans ed., (Urbana, 2008): 49-104; Ragged But Right; Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889-1895 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007); Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: New Press, 1993); Ronald Radano, Lying up a Nation: Race and Black Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Sotiropoulos, Staging Race, 1-11. For the way in which the black and white middle class may not have fully heard the performances of the Old Plantation see Clare Corbould, “Streets, Sounds and Identity in Interwar Harlem,” Journal of Social History 40 (Summer 2007), 859-894.

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and the Negro Buildings became contested sites in a black public sphere closely monitored by

whites. These multiple performances of blackness were prescient of a commercial and public

racial identity. As much as the Old Plantation was a performance, so too was the black elite’s

participation in the fairs a performance of white inscribed standards of acceptable bourgeois

behavior. In some ways, then, the Old Plantation made more clear the restrictions placed on

black life in the Jim Crow South. If the Negro Building and the black elite’s performance of

bourgeois comportments hid the constraints placed on African Americans, the Old Plantation

brought them to the fore.111

Confronted with multiple performances of blackness, the Negro Buildings served as

instructional tools for those blacks not “evolved” as the black elite. The black newspaper the

Savannah Tribune reported that the exhibits were a “splendid object lesson to the less industrious

and intelligent.”112 The exhibits could even jump-start the evolutionary process among lower

class blacks. “While the Exposition was not created to teach the world better,” wrote The

Freeman of the Tennessee Centennial, “the enterprise does afford an opportunity for the Negro

to teach the world a great lesson of themselves. The natural progression of evolution in many

cases is far too slow; and a little forced culture is nothing amiss.”113 According to this logic,

evolution among people of African descent moved at different paces. For the members of the

black elite, it was clear to them that they had evolved to a point where they were equal to whites

and should be treated as such. The entire presentation of the Negro Building suggested the latent

ways in which many local African American leaders adopted a Lamarckian view of human

111 For the ways in which the consumer marketplace, the public sphere, and black intellectual life collided in the early twentieth century see Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes.

112 “The Negro in Atlanta,” Savannah Tribune, July 20, 1895, p. 2.

113 “Annent the Centennial,” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 5, 1897, p. 4.

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development. The exhibitions of progress suggested the “heritability of acquired characteristics”

that placed elite blacks on an equal plane with whites and separated them from other peoples of

African descent.114 Implicit in the Negro Buildings’ exhibitions of progress was a narrative that

suggested that the African American elite had evolved to be a distinct race from Africans and

perhaps lower class blacks.115

The members of the African American middle class behind the Negro Departments also

asserted their evolutionary progress through a rhetoric of manhood. As historian Angela

Hornsby-Gutting makes clear, the gendered structure of blacks’ participation in public

celebrations “advanced the race’s claim that it had evolved into the highest state of

‘civilization.’”116 In an editorial The Freeman explicitly connected higher civilization and

African American manliness as it was displayed in the Negro Building at the Tennessee

Centennial. “Let the cultured Negro array himself,” wrote The Freeman, “with all the truths of

science and the power which knowledge gives, come forth upon this arena, where is pitched

upon the most peaceful heights, the heights of liberty, the war for peace, and demonstrate in his

114 As Robert Nye notes it is important to remember that in the late nineteenth century the individual and society were viewed on a continuum, not as binary opposites. Individual displays of African American progress suggested the ways in which progressive characteristics could stand in for the group. Nye, “Sociology and Degeneration,” 50.

115 Given the pervasiveness of evolutionary discourse in the late-nineteenth century this is not as great of a stretch as one might think. For instance, two years after the Tennessee Centennial, Henry Parks, an AME reverend, published Africa: The Problem of a New Century (1899), in which he argued that Africans and African Americans were distinct races of people. Replicating the narrative of the Negro Buildings, Parks argued that African Americans had evolved due to their three hundred year contact with Anglo-America, while Africans remained trapped in the past. Kevin Gaines has also noted the pervasiveness of Social Darwinian thought, heredity science, and eugenics among the black elite. On Henry Parks’ Africa see Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 54-55; and Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 81-82.

116 Hornsby-Gutting, Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 131.

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manly bearing the outlines of unimpeachable dusky brow.”117 Richard Hill’s management of the

Negro Department was referred to as “every inch manly and full of race love.”118 Likewise,

Atlanta’s Negro Building was characterized as a “manly effort.”119 Asserting the Negro Building

as an embodiment of African American manhood, the black middle class connected itself to a

prevalent discourse that linked manliness and civilization.120

The black elite were not ready, however, to abandon those left behind. As a result, lower

class blacks needed to be uplifted, while Africans needed to be civilized. This lesson was not lost

on white observers. Leslie’s Weekly reported that the Negro Building was “representative of the

more advanced class of blacks, but is suggestive of possibilities of growth and development

which are most hopeful and encouraging.”121 Alice Bacon commented that the Negro Building

was a “revelation” to the “ignorant country people.” And that “those who went away after seeing

and believing, carried with them a new incentive to industry, a new hope for the future, and a

new reason for bearing patiently present disadvantages in the certainty that they were but

temporary and could be overcome by effort.”122 Like the other exhibits at the expositions both

white and black observers hoped that fairgoers who had not internalized the lessons of

civilization and modern progress would be overwhelmed by the displays and conform to the 117 M. A. Majors, “Nashville Tennessee” Indianapolis The Freeman (May 29, 1897) 3.

118 W. H. Councill, “The Tennessee Centennial. The Negro Department Compared with the Atlanta Department—the Chief and His Prompters.” Indianapolis The Freeman (April 3, 1897): 7.

119 “A Huge Assembly” Atlanta Constitution (September 26, 1895): 5.

120 See Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Summers, Manliness and its Discontents.

121 John Y. Foster, “The Meaning of the Atlanta Exposition,” Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated (December 5, 1895), 363.

122 Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 24.

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moral and social standards of the New South. Moreover, it was believed that in doing so the

“Negro Question” could be answered by a slow incrementalism that did not openly challenge the

South’s racial hierarchies.

Given the pervasiveness and popularization of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth

century it is not surprising that prominent African Americans were influenced by its logic. Faced

with an ideology of progress on one side and degeneration on the other, historian Walter Weare

correctly contends that the black elite was given “little choice except to believe passionately that

the race, like [Booker T.] Washington himself, was going to go up from slavery, that history was

on their side, that the invisible hand of Darwin would favor the man farthest down, whose greater

struggle rendered him the fittest.”123 Even W. E. B. Du Bois, who later moved away from a

biological conception of race, initially adopted late nineteenth century notions of evolutionary

progress.124 In explicit contrast to the Old Plantation and Dahomey Village, the Negro

Department presented people of African descent as forward moving and full partakers in

modernity. It also asserted, however, that those Africans who remained in Africa had developed

at a slower pace. In doing so, the building, unfortunately, confirmed a historical narrative that

viewed slavery as a civilizing force.

The Negro Buildings demonstrate the dialogical nature of black elite identity in the late

nineteenth century. By adopting a narrative of progress that was based on a racial science that

often excluded them, the members of the black elite challenged the conclusions but not the

science. They lent credence to both an intra- and inter-racial hierarchy. If, as the black elite

123 Weare, “New Negroes for a New Century,” 93.

124 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Conservation of the Races (Washington, 1897): 9-10, 12, 15. For a further discussion of Du Bois and the discourse of civilization see Bederman, Manliness & Civilization, 27. That international expositions were key vehicles for the disseminations of social and biological evolutionary science is the main point of Robert Rydell’s work. Rydell, All The World’s A Fair.

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asserted, they were superior to lower class and rural blacks as well as Africans, they also, then,

confirmed the science that placed them outside American civilization. Caught within the

scientific and racial logic of the day, the Negro Buildings and exhibits demonstrated the black

elite’s right to equality, while at the same time confirming a racial hierarchy of human life for

white observers.

Following some members of the black press, historians have interpreted the expositions

to be segregated spaces.125 And while it is true that the expositions were discriminatory spaces,

they were not officially segregated and their organizers worked hard to make it known within the

black community that they were welcomed. The South’s expositions gave African Americans an

opportunity to present their own vision within the official discursive space of the fair. For

members of an aspiring class the entire exposition and not just the Negro Building became an

important stage on which to present and perform the progress made since Emancipation. In the

end, the expositions operated more as open than closed space. Significantly, this occurred at a

moment when de jure segregation was sweeping the South.126 In the liminal space of the

125 Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness, 147-151; Rydell, All The World’s A Fair, 85. Hale, borrowing from the work of Rydell, maintains that the Cotton States exposition was segregated. Recognizing that African Americans were allowed into all the fair’s buildings, Hale asserts they were denied refreshments anywhere but the Negro Building. Her evidence, like Rydell, comes from a single black newspaper in Atlanta. Taking a more comprehensive approach demonstrates a less rigid system in both Nashville and Atlanta.

126 The evidence presented by black participation in the Atlanta and Nashville expositions suggests the fluidity of the color line into the 1890s. Never a hard and fast system, segregation was often quite porous. It is important to note, however, that blacks participated in southern expositions at whites’ pleasure, ensuring that whites never gave up their power in the South’s system of racial hierarchy. See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957); and Howard Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978). For an update of the Woodward thesis, which argues against a monolithic Solid South see Mark Schultz, The Rural Face of White Supremacy: Beyond Jim Crow (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).

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exposition grounds southerners presented an image of peaceful coexistence between the races,

one which many African Americans were quick to utilize even if they had to ride Jim Crow to

get there.127

Not all African Americans, however, were in favor of the expositions. The main

opposition came from the northern black press led by the Cleveland Gazette.128 As early as

February 1895 the Gazette was calling on blacks to boycott the Atlanta exposition. Principally,

the Gazette feared that the exposition was a setup to prove the inferiority of African

Americans.129 When it became clear that the exposition would present a creditable Negro

Exhibit, the Gazette emphasized the fair’s Jim Crow character. Along with the Washington Bee,

the Gazette ran stories of discrimination at the Atlanta exposition.130 Two years later, the

Cleveland Gazette emerged again as the main opponent of the Tennessee Centennial. Like

127 The black newspaper, the Kansas City Topics, reported on the Atlanta exposition: “There will be no separate gates and foolish separations that so exasperate colored citizens from northern states. Of course the separate car law is in force and this will keep from the exposition thousands of northern colored people. Mr. Penn has assurances however, that the accommodations will be equal to those of the whites. These separations and restrictions are as obnoxious to refined colored people of the south as to those of the north, but the more thoughtful of the race recognize this as but one phase of American prejudice.” “Negro Exposition,” Kansas City Topics, August 8, 1895, p. 1.

128 Some black Nashvillians, led by the Nashville Citizen, did try to organize a boycott of the Centennial. However, most voices against the expositions came from the North. “Untitled,” Kansas City American Citizen, March 12, 1897, p. 2.

129 “The Exposition A Farce,” Cleveland Gazette, February 9, 1895, p. 2.

130 For instance, the Gazette reported that a member of the press gang was refused a soda water at the Agriculture building. “In many places of amusement,” reported the Gazette, “like the roof garden, black visitors are not allowed at all. It is also true that the gate-keepers and the attendants in several buildings are not as courteous and attentive to black patrons as whites.” The Washington Bee also reported “prejudice in the worse extreme” at the Atlanta fair. Theda Perdue suggests a typical level of segregation at the Atlanta exposition. However, there is enough contrary evidence to suggest that the exposition’s segregation was anything but rigid. “They Do Draw It,” Cleveland Gazette, December 7, 1895, p. 1; “The Bee Tells the Truth,” Washington Bee, November 30, 1895, p. 1; Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 31.

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Atlanta, the Gazette interpreted the Negro Building to be an extension of Jim Crow.131 Others

took the expositions as an opportunity to agitate against segregation. Ida B. Wells in the Chicago

Conservator demanded that the Tennessee Centennial executive end the discrimination of blacks

on the railroads in time for the fair.132

With the racial dynamics of the day, it is a given that African Americans faced

discrimination going to and within the expositions. Many northern blacks understood that a trip

south put them in danger and made a good calculation that a visit was not worth it. That northern

African Americans had to ride in segregated rail cars upon entering the South kept many

away.133 Even though it claimed that “Northern Negroes can be treated fair in the South,” the

Kansas City Topics reported that black Kansans would not make an exhibit or attend the Atlanta

exposition because “[they] strongly hate the South and do not feel that they want to go there

because there is a jim crow law and colorline.”134 Other black newspapers that covered the

131 “Tennessee Centennial,” Cleveland Gazette, April 10, 1897, p. 2.

132 Quoted in “Untitled,” Kansas City American Citizen, February 12, 1897, p. 2.

133 The Weekly Blade suggested that there were few exhibits from northern blacks because of the “fear of the outrageous discrimination practiced against these people by several of the railroads running into Atlanta: the southern railroad system being possibly the only exception.” Despite this the Blade still saw the exposition as opportunity to end racial discrimination: “But this exposition will do more to break up this diabolical outrage than anything that has ever happened.” The Southern Railroad, perhaps seeing an opportunity, frequently advertised in the black press during the expositions that African Americans would be “treated well” on its cars. “Every convenience is offered by this road to the colored people,” advertised the Southern Railroad in late October. Few northern African Americans, however, took up the railroad’s offer. Dr. Hammond, “A Race Triumph,” Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade, November 23, 1895, p. 1; “The Southern Railroad,” Washington Bee, October 12, 1895, p. 1; “The Southern Railroad to Atlanta,” Washington Bee, October 26, 1895, p. 1.

134 “No Negro Exhibit,” Kansas City Topics, August 22, 1895, p. 2.

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expositions, however, were in favor of them and reported a relative absence of “race prejudice”

at the fairs.135

When the Cotton States and International Exposition opened on September 18, 1895

Booker T. Washington was not the only black presence at the fair. As the exposition executive

marched with the United States Army through the streets of Atlanta to the fairgrounds, they were

accompanied by the Second Battalion of the Colored Infantry commanded by Lieutenant Colonel

F. H. Crumbley and the Lincoln Guards, an African American militia from Macon, Georgia.136

Increasingly denied a strong public military presence, black soldiers made their presence

known.137 Moreover, African Americans, like whites, flooded the fairgrounds on opening day.

The New York World reported that in Atlanta “[t]he people swarmed into the buildings – black

and white, Georgia Colonels and all.”138 Blacks attended in decent numbers throughout the

135 The Freeman reported in May 1897 that the “most enjoyable feature at the [Nashville] Exposition is an absence of race prejudice.” By June the newspaper had tempered its assessment but remained supportive of the southern exposition movement. Chas. H. Stewart, “The Tennessee Centennial a Visit to the Sunny South,” Indianapolis The Freeman, May 1, 1897, p. 8; Chas. H. Stewart, “The Negro Day,” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 5, 1897, p. 1; Lizzie C. Williams, “The Athens of the South,” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 26, 1895, p.1. The Indianapolis Freeman, Salt Lake City Broad Ax, Charlotte Observer, Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade, Savannah Tribune, Kansas City Topics, Baltimore Afro-American, and the Leavenworth (Kansas) Herald all had positive reviews of the Negro exhibits and buildings.

136 “Miles of Moving Soldiers,” Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1895, p. 2.

137 Both Steven Hahn and Kathleen Clark have emphasized the importance of military display in maintaining black rights. Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

138 James Creelman, “South’s New Epoch,” New York World, September 18, 1895 quoted in “An Article in the New York World,” Harlan, The Booker T. Washington Papers, 13.

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course of the expositions, peaking during congresses and on days devoted to African

Americans.139

In an effort to combat stories circulating in the black press of discrimination at the

Atlanta exposition, I. Garland Penn frequently sent articles to black newspapers making clear the

openness of the exposition space. In response to a question from the assistant managing editor of

the Christian Guardian in Toronto, Canada regarding the treatment of blacks at the exposition,

Penn responded: “There are no such signs on exhibit buildings as are intimated [by the Literary

Digest], and the colored people are welcome to all buildings, and reports to the contrary are only

circulated by designing men of our race to prevent an attendance of colored people….The fact is

the colored people are treated exceptionally good (just as their exhibit and demeanor merits)—

far better than many expected.” Penn included with his article the testimony of five prominent

black Atlantans who all reported that they attended the exposition without problems. He also

suggested, however, that only a certain class of blacks—those whose “exhibit and demeanor

merits”—could expect to be treated well.140

Alice Bacon seconded the testimony of Penn, commenting that “[w]hile there is no social

mingling of the two races, they met and observed each other on the fair grounds, in the street

139 It is difficult to determine, with any degree of accuracy, the number of African Americans who took in the fairs. Herman Justi in his history of the Tennessee Centennial noted that the “attendance of negroes on special days, and in fact at all times, was large.” The Savannah Tribune reported of the Cotton States Exposition that “the attendance of the colored people is fair, especially those of other states. The colored citizens of Atlanta are doing much to solve the Negro question by conducting various kinds of paying business.” In the end, it is safe to assume that blacks did not attend that fairs at anywhere near the rate of whites but this does not preclude them from a salient presence at the expositions. For instance, the Baltimore Sun reported that twenty thousand African Americans attended the Tennessee Centennial on Negro Day. Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, 198, 398; “Saying About Atlanta,” Savannah Tribune, December 7, 1895, p. 2; and “Colored People’s Work” Baltimore Sun, August 16, 1897, p. 3.

140 “Negro Editors Meet,” Atlanta Constitution, November 22, 1895, p. 11.

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cars, at the railway stations, at public meeting, in their walks about the city streets. They shopped

in the same stores, they looked at and discussed the same exhibits and they exchanged ideas now

and then as they passed each other that produced their effect on both sides.”141 The Savannah

Tribune reported that “negro visitors can enter any building that is open to whites, and there is no

limit to their enjoyment of the exhibits and side shows.”142 In Atlanta, for a brief moment, the

color line became fluid.

Like Atlanta, the Tennessee Centennial was accused of being a segregated space. In

response to such accusations, journalist and un-ambiguous African American, John Edward

Bruce under the penname Bruce Grit published an account of his trip to the exposition. In it

Bruce confirmed the open nature of the exposition space:

I visited every building on the grounds, especially those to which local kickers said

negroes would not be admitted, viz, the Woman’s building and the Auditorium. At both

these places I was treated courteously, as I was in all other buildings I visited. It was said

also that negroes could not buy refreshing drinks in the Agricultural building, where there

is a soda water fountain. I went over there, bought soda water and drank it on the spot.

The roof didn’t fall in, and nobody called me ‘nigra’ either. I had a similar refreshment

in the Machinery building, where I also partook of some delightful sweet cider, which

was served to me by a white woman of tender years and prepossessing face, who politely

requested me to call again.143

141 Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 23.

142 “The Negro at the Exposition,” Savannah Tribune, November 2, 1895, p. 1. Stewart M. Lewis, an African American editor from Washington, DC, told the Constitution that “I went into every building and studied the exhibits. Nowhere was discourtesy shown me. The negro is treated as well here as he is treated anywhere.” “The Colored Press,” Atlanta Constitution, November 8, 1895, p. 11.

143 Bruce Grit, “Colored Men in Business,” Salt Lake City Broad Ax, September 18, 1897, p. 4.

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While it is important to recognize that discrimination took place at the fairs, the evidence

suggests that the expositions opened space for African American participation not only as objects

on display but as fairgoers free to engage in most aspects of the fairs. At the expositions, African

Americans, side-by-side with whites, performed a Jim Crow modernity.

The various congresses hosted by the Negro Departments also increased the black

presence at the fairs. The congresses, what we would call conferences, were the events that most

clearly put forth a program of African American progress. The congresses held at the Cotton

States Exposition included societies of black soldiers, religious congresses, the YMCA,

temperance societies, the National Afro-American Press Convention, education, the National

Association of Colored Women, and significantly, a congress on Africa presented by the

Gammon Theological Seminary.144 Most congresses were held conjointly between a local

African American church and the exposition space. While offering “an exhibition of progress in

fact and figure,” the congresses were often explicitly political.145

It served the interests of the white executive to have African Americans attend the

exposition – not only to convince northerners of harmonious race relations but to provide much

needed revenue.146 On both counts they were successful. The Brooklyn Eagle reported that

“everywhere you see the negro” and that there was “no place about the exhibition where he is not

144 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 62. “The National Association of Colored Women Meet in Nashville, Tenn.” Indianapolis The Freeman (October 2, 1897): 40.

145 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 62.

146 The Atlanta Constitution reported: “The negro will form an important factor in the attendance upon the exposition and the fact that their interests are being well looked after will cause many to come who would not come if they thought that there would be any difficult in their being cared for.” “The Negro Board,” Atlanta Constitution, June 14, 1895, p. 9.

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as good as anybody else.”147 The New York committee in its history of the Atlanta exposition

noted that the “negroes are another never-failing subject for the observation and the study of

Northern and foreign visitors. They abound everywhere.”148 The Atlanta Constitution reported

that northern visitors were taken aback by the sophistication of African Americans at the Cotton

States Exposition. The newspaper suggested that northerners forgot that blacks had been in

“close and familiar contact with the most refined and highly civilized people to be found in the

world, and that the most progressive of the race have imbibed something of the energy,

enterprise and aspirations of the people with who their lot is cast.”149 Hijacking African

Americans’ performances of progress, southern whites took credit for blacks’ development and

in doing so maintained that southerners had the answer to the “Negro question.”

The ability to perform bourgeois sensibilities was paramount to the educated black elite’s

assertion that they should be treated as equal partners in American citizenship. As a result,

African American newspapers frequently commented on the behavior and dress of blacks at the

fairs. The Weekly Blade reported: “The easy, graceful, polite attention of ladies and gentlemen

in charge of the exhibits were among the things to be very highly commended.”150 Charles

Douglass, son of recently deceased Frederick Douglass, emphasized the importance of African

Americans performing middle class sensibilities at the expositions. “A large gathering of well

dressed, intelligent and well behaved colored people,” said Douglass, “cannot but make a

147 Hand Book to the Cotton States and International Exposition: Being a Faithful Account of What a Representative of the Brooklyn Eagle Saw When He Visited the Fair (Atlanta, 1895): 11-12. Microfilm Reel 126: 3. SNMAHL.

148 New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, 278-279.

149 “Negro Day,” Atlanta Constitution, October 20, 1895, p. 16.

150 Dr. Hammond, “A Race Triumph” Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade, November 23, 1895, p. 1.

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favorable impression among those who know us as menials in rags and ignorance.”151 Such

performances, Douglass suggested, could improve whites’ treatment of a certain class of

blacks.152

In Nashville, African Americans continued to focus on their behavior as a sign of racial

progress. The Freeman warned blacks that at the exposition they would be watched and should

behave accordingly: “The thousands of our people…should conduct themselves prudently,

because we are on dress parade.”153 Apparently blacks did take The Freeman’s advice and

performed bourgeois comportments. “The behavior of the colored people upon the grounds,”

wrote Charles Stewart for The Freeman, “the immense attendance and the good natured humor

displayed in every incident and during every hour of the day reflect with credit upon the

manners, the patriotism and the character of the colored people of this city and State.”154

Recognizing that they would be scrutinized and cognizant of the stereotypes surrounding the

race, many African Americans took extra steps to ensure that they adopted middle class

comportments and thereby confirm their modernity.155

African Americans’ performances did not go unnoticed by the white press, which

commented favorably on black fairgoers. Remarking on the six thousand African Americans

151 Quoted in Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 23-24.

152 Douglass went on: “This favorable impression was noticeable to a remarkable degree in the manner of our treatment in public conveyances and in the shops of Atlanta….Now I claim that our going to Georgia in such numbers, with head erect, acting and talking like free men and women had much to do with our respectful treatment.” Quoted in Bacon, Negro and the Atlanta Exposition, 23-24.

153 M.A. Majors, “Nashville Tennessee,” Indianapolis The Freeman, May 29, 1897, p. 3.

154 Chas. H. Stewart, “Crowned With Success,” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 12, 1897, p. 5.

155 Michelle Mitchell has noted the importance of public performance to the black middle class. Mitchell, Righteous Propagation, 115.

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who came to Nashville for “Negro Employees Day,” local newspapers reported “a lack of

boisterousness” among visiting blacks. “It became so noticeable,” reported the Nashville Banner,

“that it was the subject of general comment at the depot. A better-behaved or more orderly crowd

of people never passed through the gates.”156 The “exhibitionary complex” of the fairs gave

African Americans an opportunity to demonstrate their progress and undermine images of blacks

as rural and backwards. It also meant, however, that whites were given opportunities for

surveillance not found in Atlanta and Nashville’s black areas.157

Although white observers were pleased by the order displayed by African American

fairgoers, elite blacks were sensitive to the presence of lower class blacks. To these observers the

behavior of poor blacks undermined their performances of bourgeois sensibilities. John Edward

Bruce noted that while there was a “well-dressed and well-ordered crowd” at the Tennessee

Centennial, there were also blacks who were “bumptious, overbearing, odoriferous and greasy in

public places.”158 Bruce’s complaints about lower class blacks seem out of character. Bruce, who

later became the personal secretary of Marcus Garvey, was often a defender of the poor black

masses. His biographer, Ralph L. Crowder, notes that Bruce’s ideological position “combined

elements of Black nationalism and separation with political and civil protest.”159 That Bruce was

complaining about blacks who may undermine a vision of progress suggests the stakes for

156 “Big Crowds [illegible] of Negro [illegible],” Nashville Banner, August 25, 1897, p. 1.

157 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London, 1995), 61. For a good overview of the opportunities for white surveillance in integrated public amusement spaces see Andrew W. Kahrl, “‘The Slightest Semblance of Unruliness’: Steamboat Excursions, Pleasure Resorts, and the Emergence of Segregation Culture on the Potomac River,” The Journal of American History (March 2008), 1108-1136, esp. 1121.

158 Quoted in Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs,” 168.

159 Ralph L. Crowder, John Edward Bruce: Politician, Journalist, and Self-trained Historian of the African Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 6.

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African Americans at the South’s expositions. Here the appearances and smells of lower class

blacks threatened the images of progress performed by middle class African Americans at the

fair. Like their white counterparts, poor blacks were encouraged to behave according to middle

class sensibilities and stood out for failing to do so.

Prior to his speech at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Booker T.

Washington was a well-known but not famous African American educator. His speech at the

opening day exercises propelled him overnight to the most prominent African American in the

nation. With Frederick Douglass deceased, Washington became the de facto leader of his race.

While Washington and his program of accommodation and industrial education has since been

met with scorn, in 1895 it was generally accepted as a prudent course of action. Indeed, Du Bois,

Washington’s great antagonist, initially responded favorably to the speech he would later deem

“The Atlanta Compromise.”160 Like the Negro Building and the black middle class at the fairs,

Washington presented an image of blacks as law-abiding, well behaved, and willing to work hard

in the South. Washington biographer Robert Norrell notes: “In its larger thrust, the Atlanta

exposition speech represented Washington’s attempt to counter the belief that free blacks had

declined in character and morality from the time of slavery.”161 Washington was verbally

expanding on a narrative of progress that incorporated the sights, sounds, and smells of African

Americans at the exposition. For southern blacks at the turn-of-the-century this was viewed as a

160 DuBois declared the speech to be “a word fitly spoken,” and “the basis of a real settlement between whites and blacks in the South.” Quoted in Norrell, Up From History, 128.

161 Norrell, Up From History, 125.

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genuine way to improve the economic conditions of their race and challenge the social order of

the New South.162

Black opposition to the Negro Departments came less from opposing ideological camps

than from regional experiences that influenced the social and political agendas of their

proponents. It is unsurprising that northern black newspapers took exception to the Negro

Buildings. Better off socially, economically, and politically, northern blacks in the 1890s had

achieved many of the goals still out of reach for their southern counterparts. Looking southward

they could not comprehend the level of daily racial terror faced by southern blacks and harshly

judged those viewed to be corroborating with a racial system that so plainly exploited them.163

Southern blacks were not insensitive to the accusation. Henry McNeal Turner made clear

in his defense of the Negro Building in Atlanta that he was not a “white man’s nigger.” He

condemned northern blacks for not supporting the exposition because of the discrimination faced

by blacks in the South. Noting that the Chicago exposition saw blacks “Jim Crowed by the

nation” and not just in train cars, Turner suggested that African Americans take every

opportunity to demonstrate their worth and self-respect. “If I had to choose between railroad

162 Washington later abandoned these plans after becoming involved with the colonial German government in Togo to replicate the labor system of the New South in West Africa. Andrew Zimmerman does an excellent job in tracing the transformation of Washington’s thinking and demonstrating the way in which his work with the German government was an important catalyst in shifting his thinking away from an emancipatory social and political agenda. Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).

163 The Cleveland Gazette made this point a month prior to the Tennessee Centennial: “The Afro-American visitor from the northern states must leave all self-respect behind and be prepared to yield to every degree of insulting discrimination while in this so-called commonwealth of ours. The indignities usually imposed upon us are not considered particularly offensive to the Afro-Americans of the south, simply because they are used to them and, in this state anyhow, they are afraid to make an earnest effort for the improvement of their condition, but to the northerner, contemptuous treatment must seem condemnable.” “Tennessee Centennial,” Cleveland Gazette, April 10, 1897, p. 2.

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degradation and the exposition degradation,” argued Turner, “I would infinitely prefer the latter,

for the exposition allows me an opportunity to show to the world that I can be clean, mannerly,

cultured and refined and deserve better treatment, and it is the surest way to get it.”164 Northern

blacks were right to argue that the white oppression in the South was intolerable, what they

failed to see was that the expositions offered a rare opportunity for southern blacks to present a

counter program of race pride in a region and nation increasingly convinced that African

Americans were degenerating.

Even as Booker T. Washington stood before a full auditorium at the Cotton States and

International Exposition and claimed that: “In all things that are purely social, we can be as

separate as fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.” The truth of

the exposition presented a more complicated reality.165 While the Negro Building surely

represented Washington’s proverbial “hand,” African American fairgoers suggested that they

may not be the easily separated “fingers” that he claimed. In their dress and behavior, in their

exhibits of agricultural, industrial, and educational progress, and in the adoption of the language

164 Bishop H. M. Turner, “To Colored People,” Parsons (Kansas) Weekly Blade, February 9, 1895, p. 1, 4. This appeal was published in a number of black newspapers as well as the Atlanta Constitution. Throughout the run of the expositions the Negro committees expressed exasperation with the northern black press, chalking the negative reviews of the Negro Buildings up to northern ignorance. Reporting on the lack of northern black interest in the Negro Building for the Atlanta fair, The Freeman described an exchange at a meeting on the exposition in Washington, DC: “Col. Livingston in answer to a query put by Miss. Lucy K. Moten, principal of the Normal school here, ‘Whether the colored visitors would be protected from the violence of the ignorant and cracker class,’ assured her there would be no distinction made at the Exposition grounds and that ample protection would be given every law abiding citizen. Quite a deal of ignorance was shown by some Northern colored people regarding the South—they seem to fancy it was inhabited solely be barbarians. It is to be hoped that some of them will go there and find a black face is treated no worse there than in the Capital City of the country.” “Washington City News” Indianapolis The Freeman, June 8, 1893, p. 3

165 Washington, Up From Slavery, 129.

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of evolutionary science, southern African Americans presented a case for black progress and

modernity.

Late nineteenth century Americans were a part of what historian Steven Conn has called

an “object-based epistemology.” To most Americans, objects were as important as texts in

producing knowledge and meaning.166 The exhibits in the Negro Building, then, were more than

simple representations of African American progress; they were “object lessons” that argued for

a new appreciation and understanding of black life. They presented a thesis of black progress not

only as a verb but as a noun. In the late-nineteenth century museum, visitors would stare and

consider an object on its own terms and then in the context of surrounding objects. In the case of

the Atlanta and Nashville expositions, the Negro Building in toto was contrasted with the other

representations of progress and primitiveness scattered throughout the expositions.

Nineteenth century international expositions often presented Africans and African

Americans as backwards primitives whose past was static and not progressive. The fairs’

organizers created temporal disjunctures in which African and African American peoples were

behind Euro-American progress. Ethnographical showcases of “primitive” Africans and amusing

and nostalgic performances of slave life reinforced the ideological distance between blacks and

modern white Americans. However, southern expositions’ Negro Buildings provided a space for

African Americans to assert themselves as contemporaries, integrating themselves into the nation

and the fairs’ discourses of progress.

At modernity’s core is a belief in perpetual material and moral progress through scientific

rationality, secularism, and individualism. Southern African Americans engaged in the

conversation surrounding modernity by demonstrating that they were not the backwards and

primitive people depicted in late nineteenth century popular culture. Nor were they degenerating 166 Conn, Museums and American Intellectual Life, 4.

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and becoming extinct, as the day’s evolutionary science would have it. Instead southern African

Americans argued that they were a separate and vibrant race, whose material, moral, and

industrial progress demanded they be considered equal partners in American civilization. The

southern black elite also saw it as their mission, through the expositions, to bring to members of

their race the sophisticated and bourgeois culture associated with modernity, while pressing for

the civilization of Africans, who in their mind, clearly lagged behind. Consequently, they did not

completely challenge the day’s racial science, offering a dialogic as opposed to dialectic critique.

The Negro Buildings offered a present of peace and goodwill and a future of harmonious

relations with whites, while ignoring the racial turmoil and violence engulfing the South. In the

end, however, the New Negroes of the New South presented a southern interpretation of their

race and offered their dream of the future and in doing so laid claim to a discourse of civilization

and progress that they were often excluded from.

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Chapter 3. New Women, New South: Femininity and Womanhood at the Expositions

In September 1895 a young women from Kentucky, “with eyes bluer than the grass of her

native heath and a glance more intoxicating that a draught fresh from a bourbon still,” arrived in

Atlanta to take in the fair. A decade earlier an un-chaperoned woman in public space would have

been code for a prostitute, but in the liminal space of the exposition older gender and sexual

signs were disintegrating as women from across the South traveled to Atlanta to witness the

region’s great spectacle. As she took in the Government Building, the Kentucky girl was met by

“four savages from Dahomey” who carried on a litter an actor dressed as the African explorer

and imperialist Henry Morton Stanley. The African performers were nearly naked wearing only

loincloths and beadwork across their chests. After dropping off their passenger, the men waited

while the woman’s “eyes opened in wide wonderment.” The Kentucky girl was not the typical

demure southern belle. “With a sudden determination,” reported the Atlanta Constitution, “the

young lady gathered her skirts and tripped up, smiling sweetly, in front of the wild-eyed

cannibals.” She asked if the Africans would take her for a ride but the Dahomeans, according to

the Constitution, only “grinned grotesquely and grunted” and “leered gently at the young lady.”

Before anyone could stop her, the girl jumped on the litter and the “savages were trotting off at a

swinging gait.” The sight of a young white woman carried on a palanquin by four scantily clad

black men gathered a crowd. The event ended, however, without incident and the Constitution

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reported that the girl “was happy and the savages, too, grinned with joy as they turned and trotted

back for their master, who had finished his business, and was calling for them.”1

In this brief anecdote gender, race, and empire intersected at the Atlanta exposition. As

late as the 1890s southern women lived circumscribed lives. The factories, vaudeville theaters,

and department stores of the industrial cities of the North had only begun to make inroads in the

South. These places of work, entertainment, and consumption had changed the roles of American

women in public space. Emerging from the private sphere, women took on new cultural

positions, while publicly experimenting with new political, social, and economic identities.

Operating in a similar manner, the Cotton States and International Exposition and Tennessee

Centennial Exposition transformed the gendered nature of public space in the South. Within their

controlled and ordered boundaries, southern women were set free from male chaperones and

traditional constraints. At the fairs, southern women transgressed gender, social, and racial lines

to experiment with new identities. At the same time, this transgression did not lead to subversion

but rather renewed social and racial hierarchies, providing a framework for imperial

understandings of self.

Although the story of the Kentucky girl is no doubt exceptional, it makes clear the larger

impact of the expositions’ on the South. Many African American men had been lynched for

simply glancing at a white woman and now four semi-nude black men were carrying a white

woman around in a public space. Laced with sexuality, the story demonstrates the power of

empire to transform social relations. In the expositions’ imperial milieu, southern white women

were given new social and racial powers. As primitives and savages the African men were

contained by the civilization of the white South. The Kentucky girl had nothing to fear because

as historian T.J. Boisseau notes, as a New Woman she would have “wed an emergent American 1 “In All Its Glory,” Atlanta Constitution, September 28, 1895, p. 5.

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feminist identity to nation-, class-, and race-specific identities and to the colonial implication

which attended them.” Like the late nineteenth century African explorer, Mary French-Sheldon,

who represented herself as the white queen of Africa and frequently wore a white gown on

expeditions, the Kentucky girl, “signaled a change in American women’s relationship to the

public sphere and the nation-state, it reveal[ed] new womanhood’s reliance upon class, racial,

and national hierarchies for its expression and specifically upon primitivism as a foil.”2 At the

South’s expositions, southern white women were given new powers and spheres of influence

rooted in race and empire. While the purpose of the Woman’s Building was to demonstrate

southern women’s balance of tradition and modernity, the experiences of the fair expanded the

role of women in the South.

The rhetoric surrounding the Woman’s Building and women’s participation at the Atlanta

and Nashville expositions closely followed the Negro Building and African American

participation. Both groups—black men and white women—were viewed as outside the official

political sphere of the South and yet both groups were also recognized as essential parts of

southern culture and society. Indeed, African American and white women’s efforts for a deeper

inclusion in southern public life accounts for their participation at the fairs. Like African

Americans, southern white women saw the fairs as an opportunity to present themselves as

modern to the region and nation. This, moreover, was not lost on the fairs’ contemporaries who

frequently connected the two buildings as the most important of the expositions. For northern

and southern fairgoers alike the Woman’s Building was evidence that the South was a part of the

American modern.3

2 T.J. Boisseau, “White Queens at the Chicago World’s Fair, 1893: New Womanhood in the Service of Class, Race, and Nation,” Gender & History 12:1 (April 2000): 36, 41.

3 Both groups were frequently linked in the press: “The new woman and the new negro are in evidence here, and they are attracting universal attention,” reported the Chicago Inter Ocean.

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The Woman’s Buildings, however, did not simply replicate northern ideas of femininity

and womanhood. While the late nineteenth century was characterized by the emergence of the

New Woman, who demanded and participated in the expansion of the public sphere, New South

women operated within a more circumscribed definition of womanhood and femininity. Caught

between an industrializing society and the need for women to uphold the pretenses of antebellum

ladyhood, southern women negotiated new public roles. A study of southern women in the late

nineteenth century, then, must recognize the ways in which region, class, politics, and race

played in women’s self-refashioning at the end of the century.4

The women behind the Woman’s Buildings came from the region’s elite families.

Through the buildings’ exhibits they presented an image of southern womanhood that balanced

modernity and tradition. As a result, southern women represented themselves in much the same

manner as other people viewed to be on the periphery of modernity. Historian Lisa Langlois has

observed that Japanese women operated as keepers of Japanese tradition in order to produce a

teleological narrative of progress. At the World’s Columbian exposition in Chicago in 1893,

Japanese men adopted a modern persona that made clear distinction between a historical

feminine Japan and a modern male nation. The representation of Japanese women as both

traditional and modern allowed Japan to claim that it had not lost its authenticity in its drive

toward modernity. Likewise, the ability of southern women to present themselves as both

L.W.B., “Is He a New Negro?” Chicago Inter Ocean, September 28, 1895 in “A News Item in the Chicago Inter Ocean,” The Booker T. Washington Papers Vol. 4, Louis Harlan, ed, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 34; “New York to New York,” Atlanta Constitution, October 26, 1895, p. 5.

4 Judith N. McArthur, Creating the New Woman: The Rise of Southern Women’s Progressive Culture in Texas, 1893-1918 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 3; Martha H. Patterson, “Introduction” in The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930, Patterson, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 2.

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traditional and modern gave the South a progressive narrative and a living history that confirmed

its modernity.5

Through collections of colonial and Civil War relics, meetings of the United Daughters of

the Confederacy, and by emphasizing an older southern womanhood, the Woman’s Buildings

confirmed for fairgoers that the South had not lost its “authenticity” in its drive toward industry.

At the same time, southern women did not deny their modern selves. Throughout the buildings

southern women demonstrated their participation in progress through exhibits, lectures, and

object lessons. Countering the popular image of the southern belle, the New Women of the New

South welcomed suffragists, intellectuals, and independent women to the Woman’s Building.

The Woman’s Building was not the location of a single definition of southern womanhood but

rather reflected the diverse and often paradoxical positions of women in the New South.

Away from the Woman’s Building, southern women also made their presence felt. In the

space of the fairgrounds, middle and working class women, whose sense of self differed greatly

from the elite women of the Board of Lady Managers, performed and defined new definitions of

womanhood. Like department stores, expositions provided safe and public space for women to

move unaccompanied by men. World’s fairs were an opportunity to try on new behaviors, roles,

and abilities.6 By performing their gender, southern women pushed the boundaries of feminine

identity while learning the limits of this identity in the exhibitionary complex of the fairs.7

5 Lisa K. Langlois, “Japan—Modern, Ancient, and Gendered at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair,” in Gendering the Fair: Histories of Women and Gender at World’s Fairs, T.J. Boisseau and Abigail M. Markwyn, eds. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 56-74.

6 Keith Walden, Becoming Modern in Toronto: The Industrial Exhibition and the Shaping of a Late Victorian Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 188-189; Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).

7 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40:4 (December 1988), 525.

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Southern white women were not the only female presence at the fairs, however. African

American women were present in ways that were subtle and obvious, empowering and

exploitive. The Negro Buildings’ definition of blackness was a mostly male enterprise.

Nevertheless, southern black women created a shadow Woman’s Board and invited prominent

black female speakers to give talks at the Negro Building and in local churches. During the

Tennessee Centennial, the National Association of Colored Women met and created their first

constitution. On the other end of the spectrum, black women could be found working in the

expositions’ nurseries and kitchens. The figure of the mammy was frequently employed by the

expositions’ organizers to confirm the supposedly peaceful nature of race relations in the South,

while selling northern visitors on popular depictions of the region.8 Lastly, black women’s

culinary skills created a southern taste that was sold to and deemed authentic by fairgoers. In

these ways, the Atlanta and Nashville expositions provided an opportunity for black women to

speak for themselves, while constraining them in the popular stereotypes of the late nineteenth

century.

The Woman’s Building and the female presence at the fair were also a part of the

formulation of American empire. As historian Laura Wexler has argued, the late nineteenth

century cult of domesticity was directly tied to empire. The Woman’s Buildings contained rooms

decorated to be tableaux vivants of southern sentimentalism and domesticity. Southern women

represented a southern civilization that was viewed as superior to foreign people of color and

was essential in the creation of an empire based on domesticating and civilizing the colonial

Other. This was made obvious by the Woman’s Buildings’ inclusion of “primitive” and “savage”

artifacts of women from throughout the world. Moreover, the performances of “primitive”

8 See Karen Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

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women in the Dahomey, Turkish, and Chinese villages stood as contradistinctions to the

“proper” behavior of white female fairgoers. Through these contrasting representations, visitors

to the expositions were witness to the supposed superiority of southern womanhood and the

place of America in bringing civilization to the world.9

At the South’s expositions, women redefined southern femininity in a national and

international context. The Boards of Lady Managers offered a new form of womanhood that

embraced the mythology of the southern belle, while inserting her into the public discourse of

Progressivism and industrial reform. These women argued that their domesticity and role in

maintaining racial hierarchy was particularly suited for imperial adventures. Lastly, African

American women, denied official space at the expositions, embraced similar progressive

narratives as white southern women and continued to fight against Jim Crow. Southern women,

then, operated at both the periphery and center of the New South. Denied formal political status

and viewed as subservient to the traditional bonds of patriarchy and Old South mythology, they

were, at the same time, central to the South’s argument for its modernity. The expositions’

proclaimed that a southern New Woman had arrived in the region.

The rise of women in the social and political sphere was one of the most significant

transformations of the late nineteenth century. While women would not achieve the right to vote

until 1920, the various women’s movements, literary, social, and reform clubs that emerged after

the Civil War played important roles in bringing women to the forefront of political and social

discourse. Moreover, industrial capitalism and mass consumption changed middle and working

class women’s relationship to public space. No longer confined to the home, middle class women

9 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 22.

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were expected to become the family’s main consumer. Working class women, on the other hand,

freed from the constraints of family, led lives that placed pleasure and consumption ahead of

family formation. Frequently, the target of middle class ire and reform measures, working class

women spent their earnings on fashion, entertainment, and at the local saloon. Life remained the

most unchanged for rural women. However, through local farm organizations and participation

in the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), rural women also took on new and more

public roles in their communities. Other women, mostly elite and upper middle class, were

appalled by these changes and devoted their lives to maintaining older definitions of womanhood

and femininity. Nevertheless, by the 1890s women’s position in American society had shifted

closer to the center of public life.10

Transformations in women’s lives differed according to region, class, race, and ethnicity.

No more so than for southern women, white and black, rich and poor. The Civil War was a

watershed moment for southern women. However, the gains made by women in the absence of

their husbands and sons were more ephemeral than real. At the same time, women did not forget

their experiences during the war and instead used them to influence and support southern

manhood. Almost immediately after the war, southern white women organized into Ladies

Memorial Associations that supported and sustained the memory of the Confederacy and Old 10 Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868-1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1980); Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, eds. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Ann Firor Scott, Natural Allies: Women’s Associations in American History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure; Nan Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Laura L. Behling, The Masculine Woman in America, 1890-1935 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); Patterson, ed. The American New Woman Revisited.

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South. These associations were not aimed at expanding women’s rights but redefined southern

white womanhood in the age of black freedom. For southern white women, support for southern

men was essential to maintain their social position ahead of recently freed slave women.11 As

opposed to being activist and reformist, southern women in the immediate aftermath of the war

strove to maintain old bonds of femininity and gendered order.12

Despite their conservative nature, Ladies Memorial Associations and later the United

Daughters of the Confederacy placed women in a far more public role than they had prior to the

war. As historian LeeAnn Whites makes clear, “the Ladies Memorial Associations worked to

maintain the conventional forms of gender subordination even as they eroded its underling

substance.” By entering the public world, southern women expanded the influence of the

domestic sphere.13 In doing so, they made southern domesticity and femininity inherent to

postbellum southern identity. As a symbol of a “redeemed” South, white women were banner

carriers for white supremacy. In order to preserve the white South from “Negro domination” and

“Republican rule,” southern white men utilized the image of the white woman as the pinnacle of

civilization, domesticity, and chastity. By protecting their women, southern men believed they

were protecting the southern way of life.14

11 LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 86-88. See also Caroline E. Janney, Burying the Dead but Not the Past: Ladies’ Memorial Associations and the Lost Cause (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

12 Although this does not mean that the LMAs “served as mere puppets for male ambitions.” “Above all,” writes Caroline Janney, “these women saw themselves as patriots performing vital civic duties for their communities and the larger South, rather than as purveyors of male confidence.” Janney, Burying the Dead, 8.

13 Whites, Gender Matters, 90; Janney, Burying the Dead, 7.

14 Giselle Roberts, “The New Andromeda: Sarah Morgan and the Post-Civil War Domestic Ideal” in “Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph”: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their

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By the 1890s some southern women had embraced the suffragist movement and the New

Woman. Southern suffragists, like their northern counterparts, responded to the problems

inherent in urbanization and industrialization. These middle class women from the South’s

growing industrial and railway centers wanted the vote in order to use their “natural” abilities to

soften the effects of industrial-capitalism. Antisuffragists, on the other hand, came from the

region’s elites and were often descendants of the old planter class. These women were afraid that

the right to vote would take them away from their domestic pursuits and push them in to the

undignified realm of politics. Southern conservatives were also afraid that suffrage would bring

back black enfranchisement and threaten the Democratic Party’s supremacy. Lastly, railroads

and cotton mill owners came out against the vote, fearing that women would reform the South’s

regressive labor laws and target corruption. Nevertheless, the South, while lagging behind the

North by a decade or so, was in the 1890s feeling the effects of the Woman’s Movement.15

Beyond pushing for enfranchisement southern women formed and joined literary clubs

and women’s organizations. In these local clubs, they discussed the great questions of the day

and, as the clubs gained affiliation with a national network under the General Federation of

Women’s Clubs, pulled away from their provincialism. The WCTU also gave many southern

women their first experience in fighting for a political cause. Southern women in the 1890s, then,

were not the belles of northern imagination, languishing on plantations, but were politically and

Communities, Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond, eds. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 39.

15 Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 31-32, 52.

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socially active, maintaining a version of domesticity and femininity that formed the basis of

southern mythology and identity.16

For southern black women, disfranchisement of their male counterparts opened the door

for an enlarged public role. Through church associations African American women organized

and asserted themselves in black public life. Understanding that they were frequently the targets

of southern moral reform, southern black women adopted a “politics of respectability.”17 Black

working class women were also more politically radical than southern white women. For African

American middle class women, organizations such as the WCTU, before it became a white-only

organization in 1898, and the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) along with

other local clubs provided the same intellectual atmosphere and collective identity as white

women’s clubs. Working as domestics and washerwomen, teachers and home keepers, African

American women strove to define themselves against a racist onslaught that questioned their

morality and ability to maintain the ideal household espoused by whites.18

Southern women were not unaware of the changes occurring to the definitions of

femininity and womanhood in the late nineteenth century. In a myriad of ways they embodied

the transformations in gender across America. At the same time, southern women were shaped

by their place. They embraced the speed and freedom of modernity, while remaining “dedicated

16 Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 181; Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003), 190.

17 Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 192.

18 On the lives and politics of the black female working class see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); and Tera W. Hunter, ‘To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).

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to the traditional virtues of quite resolve, of working their good influence within the home and

church.”19 Southern white women embodied the history and supposed purity of southern culture,

while black women were viewed as its antithesis. Both groups fought against these stereotypes

even as white women employed them to gain power in southern society. At the expositions the

paradox of being both traditional and modern came together most obviously in the Woman’s

Building.

There was precedence for the Woman’s Buildings at the Atlanta and Nashville fairs. The

1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition gave women a separate space, if not a separate

building, in a Women’s Pavilion. Here upper-middle class and elite women drew on “deeply

rooted traditions of separatism and sorority” and devoted the exhibit to women’s artistic and

industrial pursuits.20 Through the pavilion, Philadelphia’s elite argued that an expanded women’s

sphere acted as salve to the horrors of industrial-capitalism. The pavilion was devoted to

preserving and promoting a bourgeois understanding of femininity and the ideal household. For

these women domesticity was not an oppressive ideology, as historian Mary Cordato argues, “it

was a dynamic, multi-faceted concept that allowed Centennial women an opportunity to express

themselves creatively and intelligently, to move confidently in private and public space, and to

broaden the scope of women’s roles and behavior.”21 Nevertheless, both the American Women’s

Suffrage Association and the National Women’s Suffrage Association protested the pavilion for

19 Ayers, The Promise of the New South, 29.

20 Mary Frances Cordato, “Toward a New Century: Women and the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, 1876” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107:1 (January 1983), 114.

21 Mary Frances Cordato, “Representing the Expansion of Woman’s Sphere: Women’s Work and Culture at the World’s Fairs of 1876, 1893, and 1904,” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1989), 24.

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its lack of open support for enfranchisement.22 Despite its failures to push for women’s rights,

the Philadelphia Centennial pavilion did succeed in opening up woman’s sphere and expanding

its public reach at an international exposition.

Seventeen years after the Centennial the women of the World’s Columbian Exposition

took a more activist role while not denying the value and importance of domestic culture. The

Woman’s Building at the Columbian was the first major building in the United States to be

designed by a woman. In it the Board of Lady Managers led by Chicago scion Bertha Palmer

attempted to represent the ideal of womanhood. Palmer made sure that the women of the

building shined as examples of proper feminine behavior and the board publicly condemned

conduct and dress deemed “un-feminine.” As much as they tried to ignore and distance the

Woman’s Building from the suffrage question, many fairgoers and journalists associated the

building with the women’s movement. In the end, the Board of Lady Managers, while promoting

an expansion of women’s role in industry, science and the arts, reinforced a belief that women’s

essential place was as wives and mothers in charge of modern households.23

Given the rise of the New Woman and the success of the Woman’s Building in Chicago,

it was without question that the Cotton States and International Exposition would feature a

building devoted to southern womanhood. For a region cast as backwards and behind the times,

the Woman’s Building was essential to the exposition’s argument for a modern Atlanta and

South [Figure 12: Cotton States Woman’s Building]. “There is no feature of the Cotton States

22 Cordato, “Representing the Expansion of Woman’s Sphere,” 64.

23 John Hutton, “Picking Fruit: Mary Cassatt’s ‘Modern Woman’ and the Woman’s Building of 1893” Feminist Studies 20:2 (Summer 1994): 318-348; Amy T. Canfield, “Discovering Woman: Women’s Performances at the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 2002); Andrew Wood, “Managing the Lady Managers: The Shaping of Heterotopian Spaces in the 1893 Chicago Exposition’s Woman’s Building” Southern Communication Journal 69:4 (Summer 2004): 289-302.

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Expositions that speaks for the new South more convincingly than the Woman’s Building,”

reported the Chicago Inter-Ocean.24

The exposition’s openness to modern definitions of womanhood was clear from the start.

At the laying of the cornerstone for the Woman’s Building, exposition president Charles Collier

addressed the crowd, noting that the building was a “distinguished and emphatic recognition and

approval of a new and vigorous factor in modern thought and modern civilization which seeks to

broaden and expand the sphere of woman’s usefulness and to strike from her shackles with

which centuries of ignorance and bigotry have bound her.”25 At the opening of the exposition

Emma Thompson thanked the Board of Directors for acknowledging “new woman” as “neither

the antagonist nor the rival of man, but his co-worker and helpmeet along broader, nobler and

diviner lines, for as her powers and faculties have freer scope and larger growth, his burdens

lessen.”26 For the men and women behind the expositions the Woman’s Building was

representative of something far greater than the New Woman: it represented the New South.

The two most important women on the Cotton States’ Board of Women Mangers were its

president, Emma Thompson, the wife of a prominent financier and wholesale liquor dealer, and

Rebecca Latimer Felton, who as one of five directors of the women’s exhibits was the only one

who had experience at a major exposition. Felton was also the more radical, known as a leading

figure in the southern woman’s rights movement she frequently spoke out on a number of topics

including prison reform, temperance, education, and later woman’s suffrage. Felton would go on

24 L.W.B., “Women in Atlanta” Chicago Inter Ocean, October 5, 1895, p. 9.

25 The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated. Including the Official History of the Exposition by Walter G. Cooper (Atlanta, 1896), 54.

26 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 97.

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to become the first-ever female United States Senator in 1922. Together, the two were the

driving force behind the building.27

Elise Mercer of Pittsburgh designed the Woman’s Building, which was one of three

buildings not designed by Bradford Gilbert. The building included a library of books written by

women, musical compositions, magazines, and copies of patents for inventions by women. The

purpose of which was to “show to the world the progress women have made in every branch of

literature.”28 The progress of American women was made more obvious by the library’s

enjoining room, which featured exhibits from the Dyer collection of Indian relics.29 Space was

provided for educational exhibits, including technical and industrial schools, as well as places for

exhibits of book covers, woodcarving, furniture design, and artistic displays. Lastly, the building

was divided into separate rooms in which different state associations designed their versions of

ideal domestic space, while promoting the women’s activities of their state.30

27 The Atlanta Exposition and South Illustrated (Chicago, 1895), 149; Virginia Grant Darney, “Women and World’s Fairs: American International Expositions, 1876-1904,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1982), 128-129; Judy L. Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs: Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, 1895, Tennessee Centennial, Nashville, 1897, South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition, Charleston, 1901/02: Creating Regional Self-Portraits Through Expositions,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Emory University, 1998), 73, 81-82.

28 The Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. September 18 to December 31, 1895 (Atlanta, 1895), 124; Cotton States and International Exposition. Congress of Librarian, November 29 & 30, 1895, Woman’s Building, Assembly Hall, Atlanta, Georgia, Cotton States and International Exposition 1895—Women’s Building Folder. Cotton States Subject File: Box 2. The Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, Georgia. Hereinafter KRC.

29 Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition of 1895 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 73. Colonel Daniel B. Dyer, an Indian agent among the Modocs, Cheyennes, and Arapahoes, submitted his prize-winning collection to the Woman’s Building’s Committee on Indian Prehistoric Relics and Curios. The collection currently resides in the Missouri Valley Special Collection, Kansas City Public Library, Kansas City, MO.

30 Hand Book to the Cotton States and International Exposition: Being a Faithful Account of What a Representative of the Brooklyn Eagle Saw When He Visited the Fair (Atlanta, 1895), 60.

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The Tennessee Centennial Exposition’s Woman’s Building was also an elite affair

[Figure 13: Centennial Woman’s Building]. All of the important members of the Woman’s

Board of Managers came from the high circles of Tennessee’s three main cities of Nashville,

Memphis, and Knoxville. Many of the women could trace a lineage back to the American

Revolution or earlier and all were deeply involved in cultural and philanthropic pursuits. The

president of the Woman’s Board, Mrs. Van Leer Kirkman, was the granddaughter of Jacob

Thompson, Secretary of the Interior under President Buchanan. Born in Nashville, Kirkman

spent the first four years of her life in Cuba. Later she attended Fairmont College in Monteagle

before travelling to Paris at the age of sixteen, spending two years visiting the great cities of

Europe. At the time of the exposition, Kirkman was the second wife of Cumberland Furnace

ironworks heir Van Leer Kirkman. In total the Woman’s Board consisted of one hundred women

who were assisted by three hundred and twenty commissioners from around the country.31

The Woman’s Building was to be comprehensive in its presentation of “woman’s work.”

“Here will be gathered together the most complete library ever made of books written by

women,” reported the New Orleans Daily Picayune. “Here is a room filled with models of all the

mechanical devises ever invented by women. Here are embroideries and patient handiwork of

every kind, three whole rooms being given up to the art and lacework of women of Turkey,

Egypt, Japan, and Russia.”32 Designed by Sara Ward Conley in the colonial style, the Woman’s

Microfilm Reel 126: 3. Smithsonian National Museum of American History Library, Washington, DC. Hereinafter SNMAHL; Margaret Severance, Official Guide to Atlanta Including Information of the Cotton States and International Exposition (Atlanta, 1895), 82; Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition, 124.

31 “President Woman’s Department Tennessee Centennial,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 25, 1897, p. 14; “All Roads Lead to Nashville” (Nashville, 1897), 26. Microfilm Reel 127:15. SNMAHL; Elisabeth Israels Perry, “Memorializing the 1897 Tennessee Centennial Woman’s Building” in Gendering the Fair, 152.

32 Elizabeth M. Gilmer, “Woman’s Way” New Orleans Times Picayune (April 25, 1897), 23.

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Building was a replica of Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage. The exterior featured eight large

columns supporting a portico. An observatory, from which the entire fairgrounds could be

observed, was placed on the roof. The building was divided into sixteen rooms and filled with

exhibits from the arts and sciences to household work. New York, Chicago, Chattanooga, and

Georgia all had their own rooms. Cheatham County presented a model kitchen in which cooking

lessons were given daily. Sumner County exhibited a Colonial bedroom, while Maury County

produced a Colonial sitting room.33 Murfreesboro and Rutherford counties furnished rooms with

relics of the United States’ three Tennessee presidents.34

The Woman’s Buildings were to be both real and allegorical representations of the New

South woman. Not denying or questioning woman’s position in the region’s social hierarchy, the

buildings made clear that women’s roles in southern society were changing. Emphasizing

domesticity, history, and industry the buildings seemed at once contradictory and coherent. They

presented a southern femininity that was changing yet remaining the same. In their exhibits of

civilization and domesticity they made an argument for the superiority of southern white

womanhood, modernity, and history.

33 A full list of rooms and displays at the Woman’s Building: Rutherford County, Murfreesboro, New York, Marion County, McMinn County women gave a fountain for the entrance, the Indian relic collection was found in the South Hall, Bradley, Lincoln, and Bedford Counties’ exhibits were in the North Hall, Memphis Hall was the main hall of the building, Assembly Hall was furnishd and decorated by the women of Knoxville, Georgia Room, Chicago Room, Library, Model Kitchen, President’s Parlor, Turkish Room, Lace Room, Decorative and Applied Arts Room was given the largest room on the second floor, Mount Vernon Room, Sales Room, Hamilton County Room, Patents and Inventions Room, and the Colonial Bed Room. “Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition,” 70-73.

34 Gilmer, “Woman’s Way,” 22; “The Woman’s Building” Inland Printer in “High Testimony to the Merits of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition” (Nashville, 1897), 39. Microfilm Reel 127:17. SNMAHL; Whitehead Klutz, “The Nashville Exposition” Charlotte Observer, July 4, 1897, p. 4.

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In an address on Brooklyn Day at the Tennessee Centennial Exposition, a Mrs. Peters

asked the crowd gathered in the auditorium: “Shall woman enter the industrial world and become

self-supporting and by industry is meant all work, whether of the head or the hand or shall she

wait for a husband to maintain her?”35 At the expositions southern white women demanded full

inclusion in the industrial world. They wanted to show the nation that they “were competing

closely with [women] of the North in almost every field of mental and social progress.”36 The

fairs at Atlanta and Nashville gave southern women an opportunity to demonstrate progress in

modern life. At the same time, southern women occupied a different place in society than their

northern counterparts. White women in the South were the standard bearers of tradition and the

memory of the defeated Confederacy. As a result, the Woman’s Building and the Board of Lady

Managers presented a particularly southern version of the New Woman: one that was progressive

and future-oriented but did not disturb the social and racial hierarchy established in the 1870s

and 1880s. For many southerners, women’s new public role made the modernity of the New

South palatable.

Like elsewhere on the exposition grounds, women made evolutionary arguments for

southern progress. “Within [the Woman’s Building] walls you will trace [women’s] steps from

the lowly part she played in the primitive civilization of the race to the exalted position she now

occupies as man’s co-worker,” boasted Emma Thompson at the Opening Exercises at the Cotton

States exposition.37 This “law of evolution” explained a promotional pamphlet for the

Centennial, was made most clear by a pioneer’s cabin situated outside the Woman’s Building,

35 “An Address by Mrs. Peters” Wheeling, WV The Wheeling Register, October 12, 1897, p. 1.

36 New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, Georgia (Albany, 1896), 47.

37 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 97.

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which offered a “striking contrast to the elegant structure containing all the appliances of modern

convenience, and the triumphs of modern art.”38 By preserving the tradition and patriotism of a

pioneer’s cabin, Tennessee women made claims on both their lineage as “true” Americans as

well as demonstrate their progressive nature. While some northerners might think that all

southerners resided in such cabins, the Woman’s Building stood as counter-argument.39

At the expositions’ Woman’s Building, the Board of Lady Managers’ argument for the

progressive nature of southern womanhood was intimately linked to questions of work and

industry. Through the exhibits the buildings suggested the progressive and modern nature of

labor associated with “woman’s work.” Exhibits of lace and stitching, “feminine arts,” and

needlework confirmed traditional definitions of femininity. At the same time, other exhibits,

such as patented inventions by women, combined with lectures demanding a larger role for

women in southern industry transformed traditional notions of women’s labor. Despite the

hodgepodge nature of the building, observers’ left with a sense that southern women were indeed

progressive and that woman’s role in the industrial economy was changing.40 Harper’s Weekly

noted that the Atlanta Woman’s Building was “distinguished chiefly for the absence of the

customary proportion of needle-work and fancy knickknacks, and a preponderance of

illustrations of woman’s accomplishments in the higher fields of art and industry.”41 Despite

38 The Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition (Nashville, 1897), 12. Microfilm Reel 128:6. SNMAHL; “All Roads Lead to Nashville,” 21.

39 “High Testimony to the Merits of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition” (Nashville, 1897). Microfilm Reel 127: 17. SNMAHL; “The World of Women” Atlanta Constitution, September 18, 1895, p. 9; Maude Andrews, “This Is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1895, p. [illegible].

40 “Women at Nashville” Boise Idaho Daily Statesman, June 18, 1897, p. 5; Klutz, “Nashville Exposition,” 4; E.G.D., “Nashville’s Exposition” New York Times, June 20, 1897, p. 17.

41 F.F. Leupp, “The Scope of the Atlanta Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly (September 14, 1895): 876.

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these pretenses to modernity, the Women’s Board did recognize the need to uplift members of

their sex who lagged behind. For them, object lessons such as the cottage industries of Russia

were examples of the ways in which poor southern white women of the Piedmont and

Appalachia regions could join the southern economy. Although in a way that preserved the

South’s class hierarchy by modeling their labor on outdated notions of industrialization tied to

cottage industries.42

Perhaps no other exhibit illustrated the southern push for women’s industry than a display

of twelve living object lessons. Twelve women from different parts of the country performed

various industries within the Cotton Sates’ Woman’s Building: a blind lace maker from

Philadelphia, a woodcarver from Cincinnati, a glove maker from New York, a clay modeler, a

designer of carpets and wall paper, an embroiderer, a decorator of china and porcelain, a stain

glass worker, a miniature painter, an oriental weaver, “a Georgia cracker at her loom,” and an

etcher on wood. In the late nineteenth century such skilled occupations as glove making

remained the realm of men’s work. At the same time, these industries were undergoing rapid

changes as they became industrialized. Thus, while the women “illustrate[d] most potently the

woman movement of the south, which is distinctly industrial,” it was more of a movement

towards cottage industries than the modern industrial labor found in the North and sought after

by New South proponents.43

Questions of labor aside, southern women were determined to show their progressive

nature, while uplifting those who lagged behind. As a result, both fairs featured cooking schools

through which women’s domestic place was confirmed as it was modernized. The Tennessee

42 Hand Book to the Cotton States and International Exposition, 60.

43 Maude Andrews, “This Is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, September 29, 1895, p. 6.

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Centennial featured a model kitchen in which southern middle and working class women were

trained in proper culinary techniques. The classes were given for free and women learned

“modern methods of cooking with all the improved appliances of the culinary art.”44 Lectures

were also held at the Assembly room and topics included “The Art of Dining” and “What to Eat

and How to Cook It.”45 In Atlanta, there was no model kitchen but cooking classes in the annex

ensured that women learned to “make of herself a comforting household angel.”46 Through these

lessons women learned how to “cook scientifically” and know “the exact chemical effects of all

foods cooked there.”47 In this way, modern conceptions of taste and culinary skill replaced the

traditional and outmoded tastes of the region’s white working class who shared a culinary

tradition with African Americans.48 Such lectures and demonstrations were designed to

transform southern women into the middle class ideal of wife as cook. “Many Women and

children were given new views of the art of cooking, and, what is of more importance, the art of

living,” concluded the Centennial’s official historian, Herman Justi.49

The cooking lessons were also viewed as a way to ensure white supremacy. Southern

women must be knowledgeable in the culinary arts as well as strictly manage their kitchens

because it was believed that “under the regime of the new ‘freedom[,]’ servants will certainly be

44 “Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition,” 72; Elizabeth Gilmer, “Tennessee’s Centennial” New Orleans The Daily Picayune, April 25, 1897, p. 23.

45 “At the Woman’s Building” Nashville Banner, September 21, 1897, p. 7.

46 Maude Andrews, “This Is Woman’s Busy Day,” Atlanta Constitution, October 6, 1895, p. 6.

47 “The Girls—They Come” Atlanta Constitution, October [missing], 1895, p. [missing].

48 On the ways in which southern taste was racialized see Camille Bégin, “‘Partaking of choice poultry cooked a la southern style’: Taste and Race in the New Deal Sensory Economy,” Radical History Review 110 (Spring 2011): 127-153.

49 Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Knoxville, 1898), 150.

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a failure.”50 Notwithstanding the fact that southern black women had served as cooks in

plantation kitchens and worked as domestics and cooks in the thirty years between the exposition

and freedom, in the increasingly segregated world of the Jim Crow South the ideal white woman

would also need to be the ideal cook. The expositions, then, were essential in the segregation of a

southern taste divided by modern and scientific white cooks and “traditional” southern black

“mammies."

The Woman’s Building’s argument that white women under freedom would have to do

the majority of their cooking seems bizarre and has more to do with the maintenance of a mythic

Old South than New South realities. Only the large-scale plantations would have had enslaved

domestic help, while most poor white women cooked for themselves and their families.

Likewise, although the employment of black domestics was common after slavery, the majority

of white women continued to operate their own kitchens. Moreover, whites in the middle and

upper classes employed large numbers of African American women to be domestics and cooks.

It is odd, then, that in the 1890s, thirty years after freedom, there would be a concern over the

abilities of African American female cooks.51

Like the model kitchen, the Cotton States’ model cottage also presented an ideal version

of southern womanhood and domestic life. Located just outside the Woman’s Building the

cottage was lived in for the extent of the exposition by a family consisting of a husband and wife

50 Emma Moffett Tyng, “In Southern Homes” in Thought Blossoms from the South: A Collection of Poems, Essays, Stories, Etc. by Southern Writers with an Introduction by Hon. John Temple Graces. A Souvenir of the Cotton States and International Exposition, 44. Manuscripts and Rare Book Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

51 On black domestics see Micki McElya, Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) and Rebecca Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens: Domestic Workers in the South, 1865-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). On the segregation of southern taste see Bégin, “Taste and Race,” 127-153.

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and four children. They were given a total of 10 dollars a week for which they were to pay for

their food, clothing, rent, and “all necessary incidentals.”52 The model home was to demonstrate

“how comfort and happiness are not incompatible with the ordinary wages of a workingman.”53

At the model schoolroom, women were shown “practical suggestions in every branch of

preparatory school work” in order to help improve them in this new feminine occupation.54

Indeed, training was deemed essential by such figures as Margaret Stratton, Dean of Wellesley

College. “[In all] phases of modern life women have come to bear a large part,” spoke Stratton at

the Congress of Education at the Cotton States exposition. “They have been admitted to the rank

and file of labor and only their own lack of training seems to hinder their advancement.”55

Women at the expositions were on the forefront of the social engineering schemes of the fairs as

described by Tony Bennett. If the architecture of the exhibitionary complex was man’s domain,

then women were responsible for the object lessons of social order.56

Southern women were much open in their embrace of suffragism and the New Women

than the Women’s Departments of the Philadelphia and Chicago expositions. On Suffragist Day

at the Centennial, Mary Caldwell Evans of Tennessee demanded that “[Woman] must be an

equal or a slave; there is no middle ground.” However, despite the attention given to the

52 Leupp, “The Scope of the Atlanta Exposition,” 876.

53 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 97; “In Woman’s Behalf” Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1895, p. 5.

54 “In Woman’s Behalf” Atlanta Constitution, September 19, 1895, p. 5. For the way in which teaching became a popular feminine occupation in the late nineteenth century South see Censer, “Women in Public,” Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 153-206.

55 “Women of Brains” Atlanta Constitution, November 1, 1895, p. 4.

56 Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995).

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movement at the exposition, the Nashville Banner reported that the suffrage cause was still “in

the state of the ridiculed” but that it had “bright prospects.”57 The Woman’s Buildings had a

tentative relationship with the suffrage movement. The New York Herald reported on the Atlanta

building that “while not antagonistic to the woman’s suffrage or temperance unions, the

members [of the Woman’s Board] believe there is better work to be done on entirely different

lines.”58 Nevertheless, lectures on suffrage, by such southern suffragists as Florida Cunningham,

attracted the largest audiences to the Woman’s Building.59

Suffragists at the expositions linked domestic life to questions of political and racial

power. “[Homemakers] are more readily appreciating as the question is better understood that

only as women are free to develop wholly according to their own ideals of womanhood is the

race to gain the ideal home-maker and the ideal home,” spoke Rachel Foster Avery at the

Woman’s Building.60 One of the highest profile guests of the Cotton States exposition was

woman’s rights activist Belva Lockwood, whose speech at the congress for the Federation of

Women’s Clubs was one of the most talked about events in Atlanta. At the congress, Lockwood

expressed her belief in the power of the New Woman “to be the leading spirit in those organized

efforts for the advancement of the race.” Grasping at the new science of eugenics, Lockwood

claimed that “[w]iser mothers and nobler men will then recruit the nation with a grander

57 “The Woman Suffragists” Nashville Banner, September 3, 1897, p. 5. Suffrage Day was preceded by a suffrage congress held in the first month of the exposition. “Suffrage Convention” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 12, 1897, p. 1.

58 “Bravely the Work Goes On!” New York Herald, March 7, 1895, p. 6.

59 “Plant Day Celebrated—Woman’s Suffrage Discussed,” Atlanta Constitution, October 29, 1895, p. 7; Maude Andrews, “This is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1895, p. [illegible].

60 “Women on Divorce” Atlanta Constitution, October 11, 1895, p. 4.

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offspring.”61 The Woman’s Building was viewed as way to promote the “good mother, the noble

woman, guided by firm, loving, womanly instincts” against “mundane mothers” and “absorptive

women who take the sap of youth from their children, who bear daughters to offer them a

sacrifice to mammon, and rear sons but to think of greed and worldly gain.”62 Southern

suffragists were not so much interested in the political power that would offset the voting

strength of African American men. Instead they viewed progress and the New Woman as

evidence of the superiority of the white race and as a way to curtail the damaging effects of

industry on the “southern way of life.” In effect, southern white women saw themselves as

easing the tension between the modern and the traditional that lay at the heart of the New South.

Southern women, understanding themselves as modern, were also the guardians of the

southern past. They saw themselves as bedrocks of tradition in the storms of modernity. In their

mind, southern femininity provided a governor to the engine of southern industry. At the

Woman’s Congress at the Cotton States Exposition, the Chicago Inter Ocean noted that the

meeting was “not trying to put forward a new woman, but simply to bring out the old-fashioned

women of the whole country and get them interested in the plan of enlarging woman’s work by

taking advantage of women’s enlarged opportunities.” As a result, “old-fashioned conferences on

61 “The New Woman” Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1895, p. 10.

62 Maude Andrews, “This is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, December 1, 1895, p. 6. In “Women in the Professions,” Helen Gardener likewise noted the importance of the Woman’s Building in breeding and producing good mothers: “Ignorant and undeveloped motherhood has been and is a terrible curse to the race….a superficial, shallow, incompetent, trivial mother has left a heritage to the world which can and does poison the stream of life as it flows on and on in an eternally widening circle of pain or disease or insanity or crime.” Gardener, “Women in the Professions” in Thought Blossoms from the South, 18-19. On the eugenic movement see Daniel Bender, “Of Jukes and Immigrants: Eugenics and the Problem of Race Betterment,” American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009): 191-213.

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household duties and mothers’ meetings [were] sandwiched in with woman suffrage and

woman’s advancement gatherings.”63

Some southern women at the expositions were quick to distance themselves from the

New Woman. One member of the Board of Lady Mangers at the Cotton States told a northern

newspaper that the southern New Woman was “just the same Southern woman we have always

had, beautiful in her nature, tender in her sympathies, loving her home and brave in its defense,

but the men have opened the doors for her to enter with them into a wider sphere of usefulness

and be a greater help to them.” In this view, the new southern woman continued to support

traditional gender hierarchies and southern manhood. If the sweatshops and factory girls of the

urban north were combining with the middle class flâneuse of the department store and high

street to upset gender order, then the southern woman continued to look “to man for our counsel

and defense, honoring, loving, and helping him as we may.” “It is not a new woman in the South

any more than it is a new negro in the South,” concluded the Lady Manager. “It is a Southern

woman of the same old type in a new South, doing her duty new and keeping abreast of her

opportunities as she did in the old days.” If the world was changing, then southern women, like

southern African Americans, were viewed as possessing an older more traditional identity even

as they struggled to become full members of southern society.64

More so than in the North, which also saw the rise of ancestral organizations, such as the

Daughters of the American Revolution, women in the South were viewed as gatekeepers of

history. As a result, the Atlanta Constitution suggested that “no single department of the

women’s exhibit at the exposition will exceed in general interest that of the colonial committee.”

63 L.W.B., “Women in Atlanta,” 9.

64 L.W.B., “Women in Atlanta,” 9. On the middle class flaneuse see Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure. On southern women supporting southern manhood see Whites, Gender Matters.

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For the women of the colonial committee its exhibits emphasized both a colonial history and a

nostalgia for the Old South. “Above anything, I desire to assert the supremacy of the southern

colonies,” stated Mrs. William Lawson Peel, “Chairman” of the committee. “Many people are

part to date the Christian era of the cotton states from the emancipation of the slaves. We will

prove that we have been civilized for generations, and that there was no civilization superior.”65

Locating southern “supremacy” in the slave era, Peel suggested that emancipation was not as

rosy as northerners made it out to be. For some southern white women the colonial South was a

mythic place of stability yet to be destroyed by northern aggression and New South

industrialization. Indeed, southern women were by far the more partisan of exposition

participants and occasionally responsible for outbreaks of sectional rivalry.

As historian Caroline Janney has argued, southern women were less likely to embrace

reconciliation than their male counterparts.66 “Because women were not thought of as political,”

writes Janney, “they could continue to espouse Confederate rhetoric and sympathy even as their

male counterparts could not.”67 While the men of the expositions supported a reconciliationist

vision that allowed for the integration of the South into the national industrial economy, southern

women, as keepers of southern tradition, explicitly supported the Confederacy. In an interview

with the woman in charge of the Confederate Relics Building, the Constitution noted that while

veterans from both sides were overcome with emotion when looking at the relics, northern

women were occasionally “disagreeable.” One northern woman chastised the exhibitor for its

sympathetic display of Confederate relics. She asked if the southern woman thought America to

be the “grandest tune in the world” and the woman responded: “No, madam, Dixie is the greatest

65 “Colonial Display” Atlanta Constitution, April 7, 1895, p. 3.

66 Janney, Burying the Dead, 153.

67 Janney, Burying the Dead, 156.

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tune in the world to us down here; we are all good Americans now, but tragedy and sorrow has

planted Dixie deep in our hearts and we will love it as long as there are southerners to sing it and

a southern land to sing it in.”68 Such moments of sectional partisanship were rare at the

expositions. Nevertheless, when they did flare up, southern women were often at the center,

performing their role of gatekeepers of southern tradition and history.69

A brief glance at some of the few un-staged photos of the Cotton States and Tennessee

Centennial expositions will note the preponderance of unescorted women taking in the fairs

[Figure 14: Unaccompanied Women]. The Nashville Banner reported that on opening day

“ladies formed at least half the crowds.”70 Nevertheless, while opening public space to women,

expositions, like department stores and high streets, placed women under increased surveillance.

As Lauren Rabinovitz has argued, women’s subjectivity in the late nineteenth century was a

subjectivity that acknowledged its surveillance. “[T]he strolling female pedestrian’s identity,”

writes Rabinovitz, “depended upon seeing herself as constantly being viewed, upon forms of

surveillance and self-censorship.”71 And when women at the fairs overstepped their boundaries

they were publicly admonished. For instance, prominent Nashvillian Miss Elsie Caldwell was

arrested at the Centennial for picking flowers. Caught by an undercover Centennial Guard

member, Caldwell and her companion resisted arrest but were overwhelmed by a troop of guards

68 Maude Andrews, “This is Woman’s Busy Day,” November 17, 1895, p. 24.

69 The northern press often held the LMA “responsible for ‘inflaming the passions’ through their commemorative traditions.” Janney, Burying the Dead, 2.

70 “Swayed Through the Gates” Nashville Banner, May 1, 1897, p. 1.

71 Rabinovtiz, For the Love of Pleasure, 9.

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who responded to the undercover guardsman’s fired pistol.72 While this incident stands out, its

exceptionality obscures the ways in which southern women changed their behavior and modes of

conduct to suit their new identities as public subjects and objects.

Like other expositions and local fairs the Midway was viewed as place where women

could be corrupted by the sights and sounds of the entertainments. Fairgoers flocked to the

amusements, while middle class writers warned them of the immorality of the space. “Heaven

knows I am no prude,” clarified Maude Andrews in the Constitution, “but perhaps because of

that I feel like being more careful of a girl’s innocence than women who know less of life….To

the naturally refined one the revelation is a sickening shock to her system, mentally and

physically, and to the coarse one—well; after all I scarcely believe that there is in the realms of

decency, even a coarse-minded woman who would enjoy such experiences as are to be found in

a few of the nasty shows of the Midway.”73 To be sure, “coarse” women took in the fair and the

police forces of the expositions worked hard to control them. In May two men were arrested and

fined five dollars for attending the Centennial in the company of known prostitutes. Unable to

prosecute the prostitutes’ attendance, Centennial City published an ordinance giving the

Centennial Guard power to arrest any known filles de joie found on the fair grounds.74

Compared to the rough and tumble natures of late nineteenth century Atlanta and

Nashville, the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial offered women safe spaces for public

participation. In the ideal cities of the expositions, southern women became members of modern

society. They were observed and categorized. Not as “well-groomed” or with the “superb air” of

72 “Will be Investigated” Nashville Banner, August 28, 1897, p. 1.

73 Maude Andrews, “This is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, November 17, 1895, p. 24.

74 “A Centennial Ordinance: Public Indecency is Rigidly Punished by the Authorities,” Nashville Banner, May 20, 1897, p. 5.

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New York women nor with the “dash of the Chicago girl, nor the eruditism of the Boston

woman,” the southern woman stood out at the fair for her “delicious womanliness and strong

individuality.” In doing so southern women took their place in the public arena of southern life.75

At the same time, the presence of working class women, “treating” girls, and prostitutes,

suggests the ways in which the industrial-city corrupted the ideal. By presenting themselves

unaccompanied in public, women challenged the South’s traditional gender roles and behavior.76

Northerners who came south for the expositions were impressed by the changes in

southern womanhood. The Chicago Inter Ocean reported that only “a few years ago [southern]

women were following the old rule of devoting their entire time to domestic and social duties.”

Now, however, there were “many women’s clubs and organizations working in harmony with

the men and women [were] talking of going to the polls to vote with the men.”77 The Women’s

Building and the public participation of women at the expositions were essential to the South’s

claims to modernity. Expositions, as Rabinovitz makes clear, constructed “a socially sanctioned

public space for women’s participation, promising the possibility of mobile spectatorship in a

safe urban environment, and this construction was integral to the definition of the modern.”78 At

the same time, women’s role as bearers of tradition meant that they never intended to fully

subvert the gender hierarchies of the South. As Caroline Janney argues, “gender excluded

women from the national dialogue on reunion just as it continued to provide white southerners a

75 “Some of the Season’s Charming Debutantes” Atlanta Constitution, October 13, 1895, p. 6.

76 See Kathy Peiss, especially chapter five, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure; Woody Register, The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 95-96.

77 L.W.B., “Women in Atlanta,” 9.

78 Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure, 50.

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source of power over regional politics and race relations.” Like their Japanese counterparts on

the periphery of modernity, southern women’s embrace of history and tradition allowed southern

men to welcome the changes wrought by industrial-capitalism. Nevertheless, by increasing their

public presence and embracing national movements, southern women acted as agents in the slow

transformation of gender roles in the South.79

Race was essential to southern white women’s (re)definitions of self at the expositions.

The Women’s Buildings’ exhibits were viewed as evidence for the superiority of white

civilization and the representations and embodiments of the New Woman were indicative of the

progressive nature of the Anglo-Saxon race. At the same time, African American women at the

expositions disrupted these narratives. Meetings of the National Association of Colored Women

along with other gatherings within and outside the fairs presented southern black women as

respectable members of southern society who were progressive and future-oriented. On the other

hand, black working class women’s appearance at the fair was complicated by their occupations

as cooks and nurses. For the African American women employed by the expositions their

presence as domestics confirmed for whites blacks’ subordinate place in the South. Finally,

caricatured depictions of mammies on the Midways’ Old Plantation restored the racial and

gender order the Negro Building threatened and confirmed the odious position of southern black

women in American popular culture.

Within the Negro Buildings African American women represented themselves as keepers

of domestic space. At the Tennessee Centennial the Memphis exhibit consisted of a display of

79 Janney, Burying the Dead, 156. See also LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters; Langlois, “Japan—Modern, Ancient, and Gendered.”

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embroidery, fine arts, and fashion by African American women.80 In presenting evidence of their

domesticity, black women challenged racist images of the black household as disorderly. Unlike

the male dominated Manufacturing and Liberal Arts buildings, the Negro Buildings were open to

the inclusion of women’s exhibits.81 I. Garland Penn believed that black women “showed more

real interest and put forth more effort to install a creditable exhibit in the negro building” than

many men.82

Beyond exhibits in the Negro Building, southern black women held a variety of

conferences and meetings at the expositions. In the days before Christmas the Cotton Sates

exposition played host to a National Congress of Women organized by the Negro Department.

The purpose of the congress was to make clear the “intelligence, beauty, and virtue” of African

American women. The women speakers were lawyers, teachers, physicians, lecturers, journalists,

authors, principals, and instructors as well as the wives of prominent African American men. The

congress’ goal was to continue the uplift work of the African American middle class, while

demonstrating to white southerners that African American home life was representative of the

domestic ideal. “The women of our race, as the women of any race, can make or break us,”

reflected Penn in the pages of the Constitution. “The colored women’s congress has a fixed

purpose and that is to promote intelligence, refinement and morality in the negro home….By

deliberation they mean to ascertain for themselves all that is before them for the proper uplift of

their people to note the opportunities that are open to them and to prepare the womanhood of the

80 “The Tennessee Centennial” Indianapolis The Freeman, May 15, 1897, p. 7.

81 “Relics Secured,” New York Herald-Tribune, April 28, 1897, p. 5. At the Tennessee Centennial, African American women formed a Woman’s Board and were given charge of producing exhibits that represented the progress of African Americans.

82 I. Garland Penn, “‘New’ Negro Woman” Atlanta Constitution, December 22, 1895, p. 22.

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race for the snares that are in wait for them.”83 Black women and the black home were on the

vanguard of disrupting racist stereotypes of the black family.

In her study of the Cotton States exposition, historian Theda Perdue suggests that the

Congress on Women at the Atlanta exposition featured the fair’s most explicit attacks on

racism.84 Likewise, the Tennessee Centennial was witness to the establishment of the National

Association of Colored Women’s (NACW) first constitution. The organization, “united in the

effort to lift the masses as they rise,” took aim at the South’s racial system. At the Centennial the

association adopted a resolution against Jim Crow railcar laws, demanded first and second class

coaches where the laws existed, condemned rapists, lynching, and the “wholesale publication of

crime by the newspapers.” They also resolved to humanize the convict lease system and

endorsed the Frederick Douglass memorial monument.85 Ultimately, the organizers of the

NACW convention were disappointed by the turnout, blaming low attendance on a yellow fever

outbreak and the fact that many northern black women refused to ride in Jim Crow cars and so

stayed home.86 While Glenda Gilmore has argued that black women progressives tended to keep

their work hidden, their participation in the Atlanta and Nashville expositions contradicts this

83 Pen, “‘New’ Negro Woman,” 22.

84 Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 45-47; Mabel O. Wilson, “Making History Visible: World’s Fairs, Expositions, and Museums in the Black Metropolis, 1895-1995,” (Ph.D. Dissertation, New York University, 2007), 99-100.

85 “The National Association of Colored Women Meet in Nashville, Tenn.” Indianapolis The Freeman, October 2, 1897, p. 40.

86 Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Religion, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 101.

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view.87 In a much more explicit fashion than men at the fairs, African American women vocally

took a stand against the South’s racial order.

When black women were represented in the white space of the fairs it was in roles that

confirmed their lesser place in the racial and social order. In her study of the image of the faithful

slave in American popular culture, historian Micki McElya notes that representations of black

female servants “equated the African American’s place in modern life with servility, obedience,

[and] joviality.”88 It is unsurprising, then, that in spaces meant to celebrate the South’s

modernity, concern over its dislocating effects on the racial order were lessened through

representations of the mammy. The ubiquity of the mammy figure was so great that even

southern white women’s accents brought back images for ex-pat writers like F. Hopkinson Smith

of the “old black mammy who brought me through from babyhood to boyhood.”89 Smith’s

casual collapsing of race and gender at the fair suggests the stakes for southern white women

attempting to maintain their spot in the South’s shifting social hierarchy. The figure of the

faithful slave and mammy was essential to this task of re-establishing a southern racial order.

At the Cotton States exposition black women were represented in the Woman’s Building

in ways that confirmed their subservient role in southern society. In the basement of the building

was a nursery where “ladies visiting the exposition could leave their infants with black nurses to

care for them while the ladies [took] in the show.”90 For 25 cents white women employed a

87 Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 165. On the other hand, Francesca Morgan argues that the NACW was far more political than white women’s clubs. Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 22-23.

88 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 16.

89 F. Hopkinson Smith, “Some Notes on Tennessee’s Centennial” Scribner’s Magazine (September 1897): 342.

90 “M.W. Ray’s Diary for 1895.” Cotton States Exposition Addendum. KRC.

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mammy for the day. In doing so, they confirmed, even for just the day, their status as southern

ladies who exercised authority over black labor.91 Moreover, the Women’s Building used black

feminine labor to confirm the progressive nature of Anglo-Saxon womanhood. One of the

proposed features of the building was an “old plantation room, with a negro woman at work

carding, weaving and spinning cotton.”92 With living object lessons, the Ladies Board placed

African American labor in an antiquated location that denied them a future role in southern

society, while making clear white women’s progressive nature. The Women’s Building, then,

gave all women fairgoers an opportunity to authenticate the power of their whiteness.

On the expositions’ Midways the faithful slave came alive through the Old Plantation

amusement. Located near the entrance, a mammy character solicited fairgoers to come and take

in the entertainment. Working an old fashioned spinning wheel, she wore a bandanna and

smoked a pipe.93 McElya argues that the slave mammy was an essential character in Old South

mythology because it helped ease class tensions in the New South. Since the mammy was

associated with the great plantations of the antebellum South, those after the war “who shared

memories of mammy or claimed some affinity with a mammy figure were necessarily claiming a

part of that class legacy and status.”94 By walking through the Old Plantation amusement white

fairgoers were able to take on a historic status regardless of their current class position.

91 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 142. As McElya makes clear, black domestic labor confirmed the power of whiteness.

92 “Cotton States and International Exposition—Souvenir Cards.” Cotton States Subject File, Box 2. KRC.

93 Thomas Fleming, Around the “Pan” with Uncle Hank: His Trip Through the Pan-American Exposition (New York, 1901), 123; Maude Andrews, “The Midway at the Atlanta Exposition” Harper’s Weekly (November 23, 1895): 1109.

94 McElya, Clinging to Mammy, 45.

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When a northerner governor visited the Cotton States his interaction with the mammy

actress of the Old Plantation is revealing for the ways in which it confirmed Old South

mythology, while opening space for her to exploit the crowd’s belief in the faithful slave legend.

Making a quilt in the same way she had “be fo’ da war,” the “mammy” told the governor that she

was seventy-five and, playing into a stereotype of black female fecundity, had twenty children.

More importantly, she turned the story of her children to the one son who was killed while

faithfully serving his master during the Civil War. Having gained the governor and the crowd’s

sympathy the woman solicited him for a nickel. The Constitution reported that her “request was

met with generous response and when the governor passed around that hat it was filled with

silver.”95 It is difficult to tell how true this story was or if the woman had created a composite

from other stories she had heard. Nevertheless, she maneuvered whites’ belief in the faithful

slave to her financial advantage, playing the crowd as she played herself. Southern black women

used Old South mythology even as they were being exploited by it. For most fairgoers though,

the women performing the role of the faithful slave confirmed a belief in black female labor as

limited to domestic servanthood.

If the Old Plantation gave fairgoers a taste of the mythic Old South, then the Creole

Kitchen at the Cotton States exposition provided them with a real taste of southern home

cooking. The restaurant vied with Sheriff Callaway’s BBQ in attracting “visitors from the north

who are naturally desirous of sampling some genuine southern cookery.” Through the restaurant

visitors were welcomed to a mythic southern taste rooted in the past. The kitchen was a log cabin

designed to look like “the negro cabins of ante-bellum days” and visitors were “impressed by its

pretty southern atmosphere.” Despite the pretenses to the plantation past, the restaurant made

clear the generational division of labor in the New South. The waitresses were African American 95 “Comrades Now” Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1895, p. 22.

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“girls” dressed in “regulation black dress with white caps and aprons.” The Constitution noted

that they represented “the working class of negresses of this generation.” These girls, however,

only served southern taste and did not create it. Instead, “an old-fashioned negro woman”

presided over the kitchen. The newspaper described her as a “genuine servant of the old times in

checked homespun frock and bright bandanna head dress.” While she may not have been up-to-

date with the scientific cookery of the model kitchen, the newspaper reported that her secret

knowledge of cornbread has “kept her race in the possession of white faultless teeth and strong

muscles.”96 In its unambiguous blackness, the Creole Kitchen acknowledged the role of African

American women in making an authentic southern taste popular to all. For northern fairgoers

looking for that “authentic” taste of the South, it no doubt confirmed for them the direct link

between blackness and southern taste. At the same time, rooting southern taste in the slave past,

the restaurant, like the other representations of black women at the fairs, allowed white diners to

pretend they were the masters and mistresses of an antebellum plantation and confirm their

contemporary power rooted in whiteness.97

With its clear reference to Aunt Jemima, who was also at the exposition selling her

famous flapjacks, the Creole Kitchen provides a window into the complicated construction of

race and taste in the New South.98 The restaurant embodies M. M. Manring’s observation of the

role Aunt Jemima played in sectional harmony: “White southerners knew how to eat and

celebrate,” writes Manring, “Yankees knew how to manufacture and distribute. Both could live

96 “Creole Cooking as It Is Seen at the Fair” Atlanta Constitution, September 24, 1895, p. 9.

97 Southern food defied the logic of segregation as white and black southerners enjoyed it. At the same time, whites frequently believed that black labor was essential to the creation of southern taste just as northerners associated southern cooking with “black food.” Bégin, “Taste and Race,” 131-133, 137.

98 Maude Andrews, “The Midway at the Atlanta Exposition” Harper’s Weekly (November 23, 1895): 1109.

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in harmony as long as African Americans waited tables and fed the kitchen stoves.” Just like

Aunt Jemima, then, the Creole Kitchen demonstrates how “[a] ‘southern’ ideal of racial order

and leisure was married to a ‘northern’ approach to enterprise.”99 In the restaurant, race, taste,

and consumption were joined in Jim Crow modernity. At the same time, while Aunt Jemima was

a pastiche, the chef of the Creole Kitchen created complicated dishes that defined southern and

Creole cooking.100 Her entrées and appetizers spanned southern, American, and French cooking.

They included fried oysters, okra shrimp gumbo, tomato Mulligatawny, cornbread “a la Creole,”

and roast beef.101 As Rebecca Sharpless makes clear, African American women were viewed as

“mediators between nature and culture,” between the “primitive” and “natural cooking” of

southern blacks and the “ordered white world” of taste.102 Northerners seeking an authentic taste

of the South went back home with the Creole Kitchen fresh in their minds.

Representation of black femininity was never homogenous at the expositions. Within the

space of the fairs southern African American men and women alongside white men and women

attempted to define modern black femininity. Fighting against stereotypes of the “Jezebel” and

mammy, southern black women presented themselves as progressive women who desired not

only the uplift of their race but inclusion in a broader American womanhood. On the other hand,

southern whites mobilized the image of the mammy and faithful slave to demonstrate the

maintenance of racial and social order in a modernizing and industrializing South. Lastly,

southern black women contributed, whether recognized or not, to the creation and marketing of a

99 M. M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 11.

100 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 97.

101 “Creole Kitchen” Atlanta Constitution, October 12, 1895, p. 2.

102 Sharpless, Cooking in Other Women’s Kitchens, xxiii.

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distinct southern taste. Despite the hopefulness of the NACW and the supposed peaceful race

relations presented by southern whites, the expositions were always an ephemeral space. Twelve

days into the Tennessee Centennial the Nashville Banner proudly reported that Mollie Smith and

Mandy Franks, two “Negro” women, were lynched by an “unknown” mob for poisoning a

family. Clearly, domestic laborers were not necessarily content and life as a black woman was

precarious outside the space of the expositions.103

Southern women understood femininity, womanhood, and domesticity in the context of a

civilizing discourse that had imperial ramifications. Within the Women’s Building and

throughout the fairs, white women viewed exhibits and entertainments through a racial and

imperial lens. The New Woman of the New South was an imperial agent whose power rested in

her civilization founded on a mythology of the plantation belle and mixed with modern

domesticity and femininity.104

Both the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial exposition’s Woman’s Buildings were

divided into separate rooms in which various counties, cities, and states’ committees organized

their versions of the domestic ideal. The rooms were a combination of local boosterism and

femininity. For instance, at the Tennessee Centennial the ladies of Rutherford County decorated

their room entirely in the red cedar the county was known for. Other rooms emphasized women’s

traditional roles as caretakers. The Chicago room was made up to be a reception parlor with

green carpet, walls and “imitation tapestry.”105 In each instance the room was a demonstration of

103 “Two Women Lynched” Nashville Banner, May 12, 1897, p. 1.

104 Robert Rydell rightfully argues that imperialism was the not so subtle undercurrent to all American expositions. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

105 “Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial,” 71-72.

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ideal domesticity; however, in the context of the expositions and the Woman’s Building, the

rooms were also a claim to an imperial power rooted in the language of race, civilization, and

femininity.106

In her study of the photography of fin de siècle domestic life, historian Laura Wexler

makes clear the imperial implications of such mundane items as family photographs. According

to Wexler, the explosion of family portraits and pictures of ideal domestic scenes “differentiated

hierarchically the lives of ‘civilized’ Americans from the lives of a variety of people not

considered adequately domestic.”107 In the imperial milieu of the 1890s domestic images

confirmed the civilization of Americans, while offering a clear contrast to foreign Others who

did not live up to the domestic ideal. It also placed women at the center of the imperial project. If

colonies were to be civilized they would need to adhere to the notions of domesticity and

femininity. American white women were essential to the formation of American empire. In the

“ambiguous zones of empire” that made up the Georgia Room, the Murray Room, and the other

domestic spaces of the Woman’s Buildings, southern women claimed an imperialist vision of

domesticity.108 The civilized nature of these rooms and parlors stood in stark contrast to the

106 There is a long history, dating to the antebellum period, of tying domestic space to conquest. See Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 25; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

107 Wexler, Tender Violence, 23.

108 Laura Ann Stoler in her edited collection of essays on North American empire notes that spaces such as the household formed “ambiguous zones of empire.” She goes on to argue that “matters of the intimate,” such as domestic spaces, “are critical sites of the consolidation of colonial power, that management of those domains provides a strong pulse on how relations of empire are exercised, and that affairs of the intimate are strategic for empire-driven states.” Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicament of the Tactile and Unseen” in Stoler, ed. Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 1, 4.

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“uncivilized” domestic spaces found on the Old Plantation and Dahommey Village. They stood

as evidence of the superiority of white female domesticity and its civilizing abilities.

Like the before and after photographs Wexler identifies in her analysis of boarding and

technical schools, the Woman’s Buildings were filled with exhibits that made clear white

womanhood’s difference from “primitive” women.109 In the Cotton States’ building “Indian

relics” from the Dyer collection were displayed directly beside exhibits of “the professional work

of women.”110 Compared to the exhibits of white femininity, these relics were noteworthy

because they were “unspoiled by civilization.”111 Likewise at the Centennial, the annex of the

Women’s Building featured thirty-two cases containing women’s work in America, Africa,

Polynesia, and elsewhere. Fairgoers were invited to compare the handiwork and note “the

primitive ideas of women connected with form and color decoration.”112 The buildings also

reflected the anxiety over the consequences of mass immigration to America. In an article

accompanying descriptions of the Centennial, the Nashville Banner took the opportunity to

disparage Greek women. “In no country in the world, supposed to be at all civilized,” reported

the Banner, “is housekeeping in such a primitive and backward state.”113 Along with establishing

southern white women’s superiority, the Woman’s Building maintained that southern

womanhood was far superior to female immigrants arriving from the shores of Europe.

109 Wexler, Tender Violence, 105.

110 P. S. Dodge, Official Guide to the Cotton States and International Exposition held at Atlanta, GA., U.S.A., September 18 to December 31, 1895 (Atlanta, 1895), 75; Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition, 124.

111 Hand Book to the Cotton States and International Exposition, 61.

112 Justi, Official History, 151.

113 “About Modern Greek Housekeeping” Nashville Banner, May 15, 1897, p. 11.

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Women’s progress in America was central to the argument for the superiority of

American civilization. In a lecture at the Woman’s Building in Atlanta, Miss A. M. Ely noted

that Egypt would remain “backwards” as long as its women did not improve. “Contrast for a

moment these two countries,” asked Ely of her audience. “Egypt with its past, it stationary

present, its hopeless future, and the United States with its marvelous development, commanding

the respect and admiration of the world.”114 Of course, women fairgoers could take a short walk

to the Streets of Cairo on the Midway to witness the “stationary present” of Egyptian women.

The displays of the progressive nature of American women, made self-evident by the object

lessons of uncivilized womanhood, and the images of ideal domesticity provided an easy lens

through which visitors were made to realize the supposed superiority of American life. In the

imperialistic rhetoric of the mid-1890s, such object lessons were not lost on fairgoers.

At the Tennessee Centennial’s Women’s Building consumptive practices were divided

between American and orientalist experiences. While women bought lacework and paintings in

the department store inspired salesroom, they also embraced the exotic by perusing the items of

the Turkish Bazaar located in the building.115 Likewise, at the Cotton States exposition women

bought “Oriental goods” at the Women’s Building.116 Southern women also embraced

orientalism in their decoration of domestic space. The Columbus Room was decorated in

“oriental” wallpaper that looked like tapestry and the “oriental lamps” hung from the frescoed

ceiling brightened the room. In a collapse of time and space the room contained exhibits of

114 “Women of Brains” Atlanta Constitution, November 1, 1895, p. 4.

115 Mary Lennox Morris, “Six Days of Delight: A Week at the Tennessee Centennial” in Official Guide to the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition and City of Nashville (Nashville, 1897), 66; “Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition,” 72.

116 “Here’s the Midway Shows” Atlanta Constitution, September 1, 1895), p. 2. In this case they were of East Asian variety and sold by an H. F. Chutjien.

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Indian mound relics alongside Burmese mummies.117 Both attracted to and repelled by non-

European culture, eighteenth and nineteenth century Europeans laid the groundwork for

imperialism by casting these cultures as backwards and weak, at the same time as viewing them

as a place of escape from the “rationality” of Western civilization.118 As women from the

working and middle class formed new subjectivities in relationship to commodities in the late

nineteenth century, they took on a distinctly imperial identity. Consumption of oriental and

racialized products confirmed a subjectivity of white superiority rooted in imperial conquest and

racial imperative.119

In her study of Orientalism, historian Mari Yoshihara demonstrates the way in which

middle class American women played a central role in removing Orientalism from the rarified air

of the academy to everyday cultural consumption and production practices. While Yoshihara is

concerned with East Asian cultural and commercial artifacts, it is apparent that American women

were on the vanguard of bringing a broad orientalist consumerism to the nation.120 Just as late

nineteenth century advertising used racialized and imperialist images to sell everyday household

products to women, the Board of Women Managers’ embrace of Orientalism confirmed the

imperial dimensions of domestic space and consumption practices. By adopting Orientalist

design, southern women challenged a perception of themselves as demure southern belles in

favor of a modern concept of femininity linked to empire. In decorating their homes with foreign

117 “Her Gates Ajar” Atlanta Constitution, September 18, 1895, p. 2.

118 Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).

119 For the way in which consumption was imperative to identity and political formation among working class women at the turn of the century see Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure. For an examination of the ways in which Orientalism played in American mass consumption at the turn of the century see Register, The Kid of Coney Island, 115-116.

120 Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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and specifically Middle Eastern goods, late nineteenth century women opened their households

to the world. They confronted, in the words of historian Kristen Hoganson, “the confines of

domesticity by turning their homes into imperial outposts and by escaping – if only

imaginatively – into the wider world.”121 Within the Women’s Building, southern women’s

orientalist parlors spoke to an escapism that came from an embrace of empire. Demonstrating

their knowledge of the day’s interior design trends, southern women made claims on a modern

femininity whose consumptive practices were rooted in imperial power.

If the exhibits of the Women’s Buildings were too staid or mundane, white women could

also witness living examples of primitivism and foreignness on the exposition’s Midways. While

the imperial implications of the Midways’ ethnological villages will be given full analysis in the

next chapter, it is important to note that these villages were viewed through a gendered lens. In

one of her many articles giving the female perspective on the Cotton States, Maude Andrews

gave advice on how to study the various “foreign” and “feminine types” on display at the fair.

Beginning with the Mexican Village, Andrews provides a racialized and gendered

reading of non-American women. Mexican women are described as “mules” that “can carry a

burden weighing three times as much as itself for a day with patience” and the other foreign

women are described in the terminology of phrenology and physiology. Andrews, however,

saves a series of invectives for the African women of the Dahomey Village. In the village, noted

Andrews, “one finds the African women in her most horrible state—almost nude, entirely like an

ape.” In her description of African women, Andrews suggests that some foreign people were

beyond civilization and wondered if there were limits to imperial uplift. Describing the women

of the Chinese village, Andrews reflected that “of all heathen women it seems to me that these

121 Kristen Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2007), 255.

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would be the most difficult to inculcate with the desire to vote.” In Andrews’ view, there were

racial limits to women’s rights and progress. While some foreign people could be civilized and,

indeed, needed to be civilized, others, like Chinese and African women, were too primitive or

heathen to warrant a civilizing effort. Moreover, in linking supposedly primitive Africans to

African Americans, Andrews confirmed southern blacks’ position as outside civilization and the

futility of philanthropic efforts by both private and public institutions.122

As a “racial study” that was “well worth investigating,” Andrews made clear the

gendered implication of the ethnographic villages. Relying on her knowledge of racial types that

was essential to her southern white womanhood, Andrews emphasized the superiority of her

whiteness and the possibilities for extending civilization abroad. She positioned herself and by

extension other female fairgoers as imperial agents. Just as the romance novels of the 1890s

featured heroines escaping their homes to partake in imperial adventures, ethnic villages allowed

women to enjoy the “pleasures of imperialism” without having to leave the United States. As

historian Amy Kaplan notes, “women [were] invited to imagine themselves participating in the

adventures of empire as a means of rejecting traditional roles.”123 Likewise, female fairgoers

escaped the boundaries of their lives by becoming faux imperialists on the Midways’

ethnographic villages. More real than novels, the villages opened space for women to imagine

new lives in the support of empire and nation.

At the Tennessee Centennial the Lady’s Board of Managers went out of their way to

embrace the great geopolitical question of the day. In late September the Board organized a

“Cuban Day” with lectures from women devoted to the “Cuban cause.”124 Such political displays

122 Maude Andrews, “This Is Woman’s Busy Day” Atlanta Constitution, December 8, 1895, p. 6.

123 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 95, 110-111.

124 “At the Woman’s Building” Nashville Banner, September 21, 1897, p. 7.

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were not as important as the cultural work done by southern women. In their domestic practices,

embrace of orientalism, and confirmation of racial superiority, southern white women provided a

gendered framework for empire. In return, empire provided a new public space for southern

women. Empire made the Kentucky belle at the start of this chapter possible. In the imperial

moment of the New South, women gained a power rooted in their control over uncivilized

people. With domesticity and femininity central to the imperial project, southern white women

mobilized their unique power over black female domestic labor as evidence for their suitability

in extending the civilizing process to foreign lands.125

When given a chance to publicly display their conceptions of womanhood and

femininity, southern women presented an image that was remarkably similar to their northern

sisters. Not the demure southern belles of myth, women at the fairs performed a gendered

identity that was oriented to both public and private space. In the Woman’s Building southern

women made clear their embrace of the New Woman and in doing so provided further evidence

for the modernity of the South. In addition to these formal exhibits, women performed a new

middle class sensibility that was possible in the exhibitionary complex of the fairs and was

extended to the New South cities of Atlanta and Nashville. This new subjectivity based on free

movement was essential to casting public space and by extension the South as modern. At the

same time, the ruptures of industrial-capitalism combined with a new working class oriented

amusement culture threatened the ordered stability of bourgeois gender hierarchy. On the fairs’

Midways gender came unhinged. Prostitutes and working class women, foreign actors,

caricatured stereotypes, and middle class thrill seekers met and demonstrated the heterogeneity 125 For the way in which American women played a central as “cultural” and “beneficent imperialists” in the project of empire, see Carol Chin, Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia, 1895-1919 (Kent: The Kent State University Press, 2010), 83-103.

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of late nineteenth century femininity. Concerned with these displacements, middle class southern

women turned to reform and memory to assuage the crumbling of traditional gender hierarchy.

Women at the fairs were the official gatekeepers of southern memory. The Ladies

Memorial Associations and United Daughters of the Confederacy kept alive both the tradition of

the Old South and its mythology of faithful slaves and plantation belles. In doing so, they

maintained a stable footing for the ever-changing whims of industry and mass consumption. By

maintaining the South’s history, southern women supported southern men by allowing them to

fully embrace modernity. The men behind the expositions wanted nothing to do with formal

exhibits of the Confederacy and the Old South. While they were willing to celebrate the South’s

manhood through Civil War memorials and reunions, they did not want the fairs to look

backwards. Southern women allowed the South to be both traditional and modern. They

presented a distinctly southern modern identity that was sold to the North in the form of Dixie

oriented consumerism.

For southern black women, long acquainted with the subjectivity of surveillance, the

expositions were spaces in which to demonstrate their respectability. In many ways, the African

American household was at the center of white questions over the fitness of blacks for modern

life. As a result, black women responded by demonstrating the ideal domesticity of the black

middle class household, while centering their reform efforts on working class black women’s

homes. For whites at the expositions, black women’s visibility came in the form of domestic

workers and caricatured representations of the faithful slave. The presence of black women’s

labor at the expositions assured white southerners that African American women’s place in the

modern world was to be characterized by servility. If Aunt Jemima was an isolated

representation of Jim Crow modernity at the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago then the

Creole Kitchen, nurseries, and restaurants of the South’s expositions were examples of it writ

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large. More so than the Negro Building, black women’s everyday presence at the fairs confirmed

for southern whites and Americans generally the possibility of a Jim Crowed modernity.

Modernity segregated by race was essential to American fantasy of empire abroad. By

comparing and contrasting themselves to the Other, Euro-Ameircans defined themselves as

modern. For southern women, the embrace of orientalism had the effect of confirming the

region’s modernity. If for many northerners the South was America’s Other, then the

representation of imperial, oriental, and anthropological displays became object lessons that

confirmed the South’s integration into the nation. Sectional reconciliation was essential to

construction of empire. Embracing tradition and modernity, racial hierarchy, and imperial

language, southern women were key cultural producers in the imperial moment of the 1890s.

What southern white women at the expositions made clear were the possibilities of a racially

stratified empire in which foreign people of color were both a part of and excluded from the

American body politic. In performing the Jim Crow modern and perpetuating Old South

mythology, southern women made modernity palpable to southerners.

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Chapter 4. “From Pitiful Resources a Great and Expanding Empire”: The Expositions and the Formation of a New South

Empire

“How rapidly [the South] has adapted herself to these new conditions—how she has grown to the

requirements of her larger duty—how she has builded from pitiful resources a great and expanding empire, [The New South] shall now proceed to tell.” – Henry Grady, The New South

“[The American republic] is a new evangel to the down-trodden of all countries…Tested by its inherent right and living force, always working with grand results for the uplifting of oppressed

humanity, it yields supremacy alone to the advent of the mighty influence of Christian civilization, of which it is the offspring.” – Judge Dickinson, Fourth of July Celebration,

Tennessee Centennial Exposition

In February 1895, seven months before the opening of the Cotton States and International

Exposition, Atlanta Constitution managing editor and New South booster, Clark Howell,

published an article promoting the fair in the international magazine The Review of Reviews.

While the article traced the history of the exposition movement in Atlanta and promoted the city

and region’s resources, it also emphasized the international purpose of the fair. For Howell, the

Atlanta fair aimed to increase the independence of southern manufacturing and cotton production

by creating links with foreign nations, particularly the republics of Central and South America.

Howell, however, noted three obstacles to expanding U.S. commercial interests in the region.

The first problem was transportation: European and British companies had a monopoly on

steamship lines. American goods were often required to go from New York to Europe and then

to South America, although Howell did note that transportation links between the United States

and the Caribbean were improving. The second obstacle was language. The language and culture

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of South American cities led their merchant class to conduct more business with Europe than the

United States. The final hindrance to trade with South America was the region’s newly formed

republics’ encounter with the inherent problems of multiracial democracy. According to Howell,

this problem could only be solved by the peculiar history and knowledge of white southerners.1

The solution for Howell was quite simple. Latin American republics must learn from the

South’s management of the races. He noted that Brazil was “working out slowly and painfully

the industrial and social problem precipitated…by the emancipation of four million slaves” and

that this obstacle was characteristic of “all the countries of South and Central America, and also

by Mexico.” According to Howell, Latin America’s only chance to enter the modern industrial

world was to “look to the cotton states of America for precedents and suggestions for the

solution of this difficult problem.” To an extent not yet fully appreciated by historians, New

South spokesmen understood their region through a global framework. Howell and his fellow

New South ideologues viewed the maintenance of social and racial relations as part of what

historian Erin Clune has called the “larger global processes of emancipation and colonialism.”2

This chapter traces the ways in which Jim Crow modernity at the Atlanta and Nashville

fairs foreshadowed the formation of a Jim Crow empire after 1898. The Cotton States and

International Exposition and Tennessee Centennial Exposition presented arguments for a

distinctly southern imperial expansion while providing a blueprint for the incorporation of non-

white colonial natives into the United States. Concern over how imperial subjects would or

Henry Grady, The New South (New York, 1890), 162; “Glorious Fourth at the Centennial,” Nashville Banner, July 3, 1897, p. 1.

1 Clark Howell, “The World’s Event for 1895: The Cotton States and International Exposition,” The Review of Reviews Monthly Illustrated: An International Magazine (February 1895), 165.

2 Howell, “The World’s Event for 1895,” 165; Erin Elizabeth Clune, “Emancipation to Empire: Race, Labor, and Ideology in the New South,” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 2002), 5.

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would not be incorporated into the body politic was central to both imperialists and anti-

imperialists.3 Solving the problem of a multiracial society by incorporating the labour of African

Americans while denying them the rights of citizenship, the South presented a framework for the

imperial modern of the early twentieth century. White southerners understood what it meant to

be colonizers, to have dominion over another people.4 The expositions, in their ordered

presentation of race became living representations of colonial space. Jim Crow modernity

became Jim Crow empire.

Historians have long viewed the South in the late nineteenth century as existing within a

colonial relationship with the North. In Origins of the New South, C. Vann Woodward argued

that the North after the Civil War saw the South and its “natives” as “outlets for missionary and

political expansionism.” By the 1870s and 1880s northerners and foreign investors, despite

giving up political control, maintained significant power over the southern economy. Looking at

land and railroad ownership, timber and cotton production, Woodward concluded that the South

remained a vassal to northern capitalists post-Reconstruction. While Woodward’s colonial thesis

has been revised and in some ways refuted, many northerners in the late nineteenth century

continued to view the South as a foreign region within the nation.5

3 Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 11.

4 Jeremy Wells, Romances of the White Man’s Burden: Race, Empire, and the Plantation in American Literature, 1880-1936 (Nashville: Vanderbilt Press, 2011), 11.

5 C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971 [1951]), 114, 118. For a revision of Woodward’s thesis see Edward Ayers, The Promise of the New South: Life After Reconstruction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1983); Jonathan Wiener, Social Origins of the New South: Alabama, 1860-1885 (Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1978), Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

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Recently historian Natalie Ring and literary critic Jennifer Greeson have returned to the

notion of a “colonial” South in the late nineteenth century. Ring contends that the South and its

“problems” were viewed within an imperial and transnational framework. For northern and

southern Progressives, the South was not simply a distinctive region but a place that “shared

commonalities or perceived commonalities with other countries and cultures.” For Ring the

South became a laboratory for U.S. imperial structures. As she notes, “efforts to educate and

train the southern citizenry, restructure the public health system, rehabilitate agricultural life, and

reconcile the ‘race problem’ with the principles of democracy mirrored imperial impulses

guiding the spread of American empire.”6 Likewise, Jennifer Greeson argues that the

Reconstruction South was a “proving ground for the civilizationist mastery of the modern United

States.” Greeson notes that literary and travel writing on the post-Civil War South depicted the

region as a colonial space with vast resources lain fallow due to the inability of its “native”

population to develop them.7 Ring and Greeson’s insights are valuable. They demonstrate how

northerners and the New South elite viewed the region as colonial space. At the same time, many

New South boosters, including the expositions’ organizers, viewed the South not as colony but as

metropole.

In their size and scope the South’s international expositions transcended the local. They

were in many ways reflections of an older southern dream of what historian Matthew Pratt

Guterl calls an “American Mediterranean.” From the master class of the antebellum period to the

hopes, dreams, and nightmares of postbellum planters, white southerners understood their region

as not only a part of the American nation-state but a region intimately connected to the racially

6 Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012), 11, 57.

7 Jennifer Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 15, 247.

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hierarchical societies of the Caribbean and Latin America. The Cotton States and Tennessee

Centennial were re-articulations of the South’s unique role in expanding American influence

south into the Gulf of Mexico. Rather than an outside force as Ring and Greeson argue,

modernity and empire were essential to the ways in which southerners understood their region

and nation. New South boosters, exposition organizers, and to a certain degree African American

elite and clergy, viewed the South’s world’s fairs as ways to present a progressive and racially

hierarchical South that could be exported to the Unites States’ future colonial holdings. With Jim

Crow modernity as the solution to the problem of the “backward South,” fair organizers set out

to advertise the region’s industrial and racial progress and to reconcile the nation through

empire.8

The fairs’ organizers went to great lengths to emphasize the “international” in their

expositions. Although open to northern capital, New South spokesmen saw foreign markets as an

opportunity to escape the South’s colonial relationship to northeastern industrialists. In addition,

anthropological villages and the U.S. Government’s Smithsonian exhibit confirmed a racial

hierarchy that placed white Americans above foreign peoples of color and suggested the need for

civilizing and missionary projects. At the same time, a growing controversy in Atlanta over the

Chinese Village makes clear the problematic presence of foreign “others” who did not fit neatly

into the region’s biracial social hierarchy. Lastly, African American conferences on Africa

suggested the ways in which the black elite embraced the civilizing mission of U.S. imperialism.

Rhetoric on “primitive” and “heathen” Africans and the need for technical schools in Africa

placed African Americans within and alongside U.S. expansionism.

8 For the ways in which the Gulf of Mexico was conceptualized as an “American Mediterranean” in the nineteenth century see Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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The Atlanta and Nashville expositions aligned the South with the civilizationist rhetoric

of the 1890s.9 By embracing the expansionist movement, New South boosters, like U.S. senator

John Morgan, believed that the South could “throw off [its] colonial status.”10 During the Cotton

States Exposition, William Yates Atkinson, Governor of Georgia wrote in The North American

Review that the South “remains largely an unknown land to the average Northerner, its

topography, flora and fauna, habits and customs, are almost as unfamiliar to him as the

untraveled inhabitant of another continent.”11 At the expositions, by contrast, New South

ideologues argued for the region as a launching point for U.S. commercial empire in ways that

defied perceptions of the South as foreign space.

In advertising Jim Crow modernity, the South’s expositions gave the United States an

ideological framework that extended to the nation’s potential empire. As early as the 1880s

Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan and Congressman Joseph Wheeler believed that southern

racial codes provided a template for the incorporation of imperial subjects. The southern fairs

took this framework and made it benign and consumable. They moved the rhetoric from the halls

of politics and elite parlors to the everyday consumption of the masses. In the Philippines, Puerto

Rico, and Cuba, natives were incorporated into an American imperial project that was Jim Crow

in nature. Imperial subjects, much like African Americans, were denied formal citizenship, and

9 On the civilizationist rhetoric of the late-nineteenth century see Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

10 Joseph A. Fry, “John Tyler Morgan’s Southern Expansionism” Diplomatic History 9:4 (October 1984), 330.

11 Hon. W. Y. Atkinson, “The Atlanta Exposition,” The North American Review (October 1895), 389.

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yet were expected to participate in the nation’s industrial and material progress while remaining

a separate people.12

Late nineteenth century southerners were suspicious of expansionist plans and rhetoric.

Many New South advocates rejected the growing impulse to expand U.S. influence beyond its

borders and some of the most vociferous critics of intervention in Hawaii and Cuba came from

the South. Part of the anti-imperialist impulse can be attributed to partisan politics. Southern

Democrats opposed the mostly Republican plans for commercial and political expansion. There

was also a fear among white spokesmen that given the recent history of Reconstruction and

supposed anarchy and chaos of “Negro rule” contact with nonwhites and their possible migration

to the U.S. would lead to the “mongrelization” and degeneration of the republic. Southern

representatives, such as rabid racist Ben Tillman, argued that southerners understood “the folly

of attempting to bring civilization to the ‘darker’ races.” When the vote came for Philippine

annexation, nineteen of twenty-eight southern senators voted against it. Despite this antipathy, a

significant group of New South ideologues viewed a U.S. empire as the best way to reestablish

the South’s economic independence.13

The imperial impulse in the South stretches back to the 1850s. Following the Mexican-

American War, southerners were at the forefront in proposing interventions in the Caribbean.

Southern imperialists believed that the region’s geography and experience in creating Anglo-

12 On Morgan and Wheeler see Tennant S. McWilliams, The New South Faces the World: Foreign Affairs and the Southern Sense of Self, 1877-1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988), 9, 55; and Fry, “John Tyler Morgan.”

13 Harilaos Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898-1976 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 25; McWilliams, New South Faces the World, 16-17. For more on Ben Tillman see Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

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Saxon societies in tropical climates made it well suited to lead U.S. empire. Moreover, new

Caribbean territories, many of which already had slave populations, would help restore the

balance of power to the U.S. Senate. In the end, secession and the Civil War ended “southern

dreams of a Caribbean empire.”14

New South ideologues began the 1890s wary of expansionism but the economic

downturn of 1893 caused a reconsideration of their positions. By the start of the Spanish-

American War many New South boosters decided that the economic and political benefits of

expansionism outweighed its potential drawbacks.15 At the same time, for the Atlanta and

Nashville expositions’ organizers, whose goal was to improve the economic situation of their

city and region, the international nature of the fairs was essential to promote greater economic

ties between the South and Latin America, the Caribbean, and Pacific nations. The Cotton States

and International Exposition looked outwardly far more than the Tennessee Centennial

Exposition. Whereas Nashville sought to advertise its cultural sophistication, Atlanta was

unabashed in its pursuit of economic and commercial interests. The purpose of the Atlanta fair

was to foster and grow trade relations between the South and the republics of Latin America.16

By acquiring foreign markets, New South ideologues believed that the region would be relieved

from the control of New York and Liverpool cotton merchants.17

14 Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1973), 4, 247. See also Guterl, American Mediterranean.

15 McWilliams, New South Faces the World, 63-66.

16 “Cotton States and International Exposition” (Atlanta 1895). Souvenirs: Cotton States Subject File. Box 2; Folder 2. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA; F.E. Leupp, “The Scope of the Atlanta Exposition,” Harper’s Weekly (September 14, 1895), 874.

17 Fry, “John Tyler Morgan’s Southern Expansionism,” 334.

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Despite attempts to attract Latin American countries to their expositions, neither Atlanta

nor Nashville was overly successful. In order to promote the exposition and to secure exhibits,

the Cotton States executive sent former Confederate general I. W. Avery on a South American

tour. The trip was a disappointment. While Avery sent positive reports back to the Atlanta

Constitution, his personal letters reveal the difficulty in convincing Latin Americans to

participate in the exposition. Part of the problem was that many Latin Americans assumed the

exposition was a parochial affair. “I regret to say that it is very difficult to get these people to

take much interest in the exposition,” wrote the diplomatic minister for the United States in

Santiago, Chile to Avery. “From the use of the words ‘Cotton States’ there appears to have been

an impression abroad that the Exposition was to be one of cotton, although we have done all that

we could to correct this mistake in the press.”18

Another problem was that South American countries were suspicious of the United

States’ activities in the region. The Boston Journal reported that “[Avery] has encountered

considerable opposition among certain business elements which saw no good in encouraging

closer trade relations with the United States, which, they argued would benefit the United States

at the loss of business interests of the South American countries.”19 Latin American republics

were wary of entering into trade relations that they correctly assumed would be unbalanced and

imperialist in nature. In Atlanta the foreign countries officially represented were Mexico,

Venezuela, Argentina, and Costa Rica. Costa Rica was the only country with a separate building,

while Mexico and Venezuela were situated in the Transportation Building and Argentina in the

18 “Letter. To: General Avery; From: Edward [illegible], Legation of the United States, June 8th, 1895.” Cotton States Expo. 1895. Avery Letters, 1894-1896. Subject file: Box 2; Folder 1. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA; I. W. Avery, “Down to Venezuela,” Atlanta Constitution, June 10, 1895, p. 2.

19 “Jealous of United States,” Boston Journal, March 15, 1895, p. 2.

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Minerals and Forestry Building. In Nashville, Mexico had its own building curated not by

Mexicans but by Frederick Starr of the University of Chicago’s Department of Anthropology and

consisted mostly of pottery, fiber, cotton and woolen goods, and some “Aztec weapons.” The

Tennessee Centennial also briefly had a Cuban Building, which overran its costs and was forced

to close. Nashville, however, was able to attract a Pan-American delegation consisting of the

presidents of Peru, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile.20

Although the South was the world’s leading cotton producer, the organizers of the

expositions quickly found that the region counted for very little in international relations. Both

the Cotton States and the Tennessee Centennial hired Antonio Macchi, an impresario of the

international exposition circuit, as European Commissioner. While Macchi received favorable

responses from European countries, he was only able to secure exhibits from private collections.

Many Europeans first response to Macchi was often “Atlanta? Where is that?” Likewise, Herman

Justi, the Centennial’s official historian, admitted that Macchi had difficulty in securing exhibits

as many Europeans had never heard of the city. In the end, both expositions’ foreign departments

contained mostly private exhibits from Italy, Great Britain, Sweden, Norway, Spain, Russia,

France, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Austria, Hungary, Belgium, Canada, China, and Japan.

Everything from porcelain to furniture was displayed and at one point in Nashville the Milanese

orchestra gave free concerts.21

20 Charles Kindrick, “Latin America at the Exposition” New Orleans Times Picayune, October 29, 1895, p. 6; The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated (Atlanta, 1896), 49-50; Herman Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Knoxville, 1898), 335; “Pan-American Delegation,” Nashville Banner, June 30, 1897, p. 1.

21 Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 1895 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2010), 100-101; Official Guide to the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition and the City of Nashville (Nashville, 1897), 18; Justi, Official History, 333.

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While links to Europe were important, the expositions’ goal was to increase trade with

Latin America and the Pacific. In January 1895 the Atlanta Constitution reported that “[m]arkets

are getting scarce and the enterprising nations of the world are filling every field, and, strange to

say, South America, right at our very door, has been neglected. That it will no longer be so after

the exposition remains certain.”22 As European nations “scrambled” for Africa, an opportunity

appeared for the South to use its geographical advantage to extend U.S. interests in the

Americas.23 While the expositions never officially called for territorially acquisition, their

rhetoric reflects what Victoria de Grazia has labeled a U.S. “market empire.”24

If the expositions were to encourage trade with Latin America, they were often undercut

by their own ineptitude and southerners’ general distrust of outsiders. Costa Rica, the only

country to have a standalone building at the Cotton States complained to Avery six days into the

exposition that the building lacked electricity.25 More significant, however, was the failure of

Cuban exhibits and celebrations at the expositions. Beginning in February 1895 the Cuban War

for Independence became the news story of the year and the entire nation was caught up in the

22 “The Exposition Up To Date,” Atlanta Constitution, January 27, 1895, p. 16.

23 “53d Congress, 2d Session: House of Representatives: Report No. 1023,” June 4, 1894. Cotton States Expo 1895—Souvenirs: Cotton States Subject File. Box 2; Folder 3. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA; “The Scope of the Exposition,” Atlanta Constitution, May 30, 1895, p. 6; F.E. Leupp, “The Scope of the Atlanta Exposition” Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (September 14, 1895), 874; Charles Kindrick, “Latin America at the Exposition,” October 17, 1895, p. 6; “Cotton States’ Big Exposition,” New York Herald, August 3, 1895, p. 4; P.S. Dodge, Official Guide to the Cotton States and International Exposition held at Atlanta, GA, USA, September 18 to December 31, 1895 (Atlanta, 1895), 23.

24 Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). See also Mona Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2006).

25 Letter. To: General I.W. Avery, Chief of the Foreign Department at the Cotton States and International Exposition; From Teodoro H. Mangel, Costa Rica. September 24, 1895. Cotton States Expo. 1895. Avery Letter 1894-1896. Subject File: Box 2; Folder 1. Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center, Atlanta, GA.

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drama unfolding on the island. It is unsurprising, then, that the organizers of the Atlanta and

Nashville expositions thought to take advantage of the growing interest in Cuba.

The Cotton States and International Exposition and Tennessee Centennial Exposition’s

public support for cuba libre was undermined by partisan politics and a general disinterest by

everyday southerners. In Atlanta the exposition set aside a day to celebrate Cuban independence

but cancelled it as it coincided with the arrival of President Grover Cleveland, who opposed

intervention. Given that the fair had received government support, Cleveland worried that

“official recognition by the exposition of the Cuban revolution might be misconstrued as having

the sanction of the government.” Atlantans responded with anger over what they considered to

be an “attempt of the National Administration to interfere with the management of their

exposition.”26 Although Atlanta’s citizens supported cuba libre the fair’s management did not

want to upset the federal administration on which they depended. Two years later in Nashville,

much of the support Atlantans had shown for Cuba was absent. Despite increasing calls for

intervention and with a Republican in the White House backing imperialist policies, Nashvillians

were disinterested in the Cuban cause.

With civil war escalating in Cuba, the Tennessee Centennial’s organizers assumed a

Cuban Village would be one of the more popular features of the exposition. In the fair’s

Programme of Music fairgoers were invited to witness “native machete fighters, dancing girls,

cigar makers, bull fighters, cooks, musicians, etc.” and were asked to “help Cuba’s cause.”27 The

opposite occurred. Herman Justi noted that the village lasted only two months due to “little

26 Charles Kindrick, “Latin America at the Exposition,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 17, 1895, p. 6; “Why Cuban Day Was Postponed,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 29, 1895, p. 7; “The Cuban Demonstration at Atlanta,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 29, 1895, p. 4.

27 Programme of Music. Tennessee Centennial. May 1 – Oct. 30, 1895. Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN.

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interest” and that the buildings remained empty until September when the Wild West Show took

them over.28 Historian Kristin Hoganson and others have argued that cuba libre and the

following Spanish-American War was a turning point for the South and the nation’s

reconciliation thirty years after the Civil War. As Hoganson notes, many southern men saw the

Cuban independence movement as an opportunity to reassert their manhood.29 The failure of the

Cuban exhibit and celebrations in Atlanta and Nashville should give us pause. Everyday southern

fairgoers liberally supported the Streets of Cairo, the Dahomey, and Chinese Villages. The

decision not to support the Cuban exhibit was a conscious one. While the South’s business and

urban elite may have viewed the U.S. South and Cuba as a part of the “American

Mediterranean,” many southerners were simply disinterested.30 The exhibit’s flop tempers

assertions of a general enthusiasm for cuba libre. When given the option many southern

fairgoers spent their money elsewhere.

Notwithstanding the failure of the Cuban exhibits, the expositions pushed for an

expansion of the South’s influence in the region. Central to southern imperialists’ desire for a

U.S. Empire was a canal across the Central American isthmus. Both the Atlanta and Nashville

fairs promoted the proposed Nicaraguan canal by displaying models of the waterway and the

Cotton States held a Nicaragua Canal Day to encourage interest in the project.31 In an editorial

the Montgomery Advertiser suggested that a “‘Nicaragua Canal would make another

28 Justi, Official History, 216. On the other hand, the Nashville Banner reported in May that the exhibit was a success but overran its costs. “Cuban Village Closed” Nashville Banner, May 31, 1897, p. 7.

29 Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 43, 55.

30 Guterl, American Mediterranean.

31 Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 135.

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Mediterranean of the Gulf of Mexico, and Alabama would be the France of the New World, not

merely in manufacturing everything for the greater South, but in a marvelous diversification of

its agricultural interests.’”32 Charles Kindrick of the New Orleans Times-Picayune was taken

aback by the Transportation Building’s model of the canal at the Cotton States. The model was

thirty feet in length, eight feet wide, and stood two feet off the ground. It featured accurate

representations of Nicaragua’s topography as well as running water. While Kindrick suggested it

could be appreciated simply for its artful reproduction, its real importance was its ability to

convince southerners of the need for a canal across the isthmus. “It will bring the markets of

China and Japan closer to our doors,” argued Kindrick, “and will enable the manufacturers of

cotton goods in the southern states to compete with the English mills.” The canal could also

expand U.S. territory by populating “sparse” and “unoccupied” lands. Despite these advantages,

Kindrick lamented that many southerners “opposed the construction of the canal on

constitutional grounds” and concluded that they “ought to visit the Cotton States and

International Exposition and study the model of the proposed waterway.”33 A Nicaraguan Canal

was essential to southern economic interests. The canal was three hundred miles closer to

southern ports than the proposed Panama Canal and would bring ships west of Cuba into the

Gulf of Mexico. “By contrast,” notes historian Joseph Fry, “ships en route to Panama would take

the Windward Passage east of Cuba and completely bypass the southern coast of the United

States.”34 The model of the Nicaraguan Canal made real for parochial fairgoers the advantages of

32 Quoted in Fry, “John Tyler Morgan’s Southern Expansionism,” 337-338. See also Charles W. Kindrick, “The South’s Strong Cotton Position,” New Orleans Times Picayune, October 28, 1895, p. 9.

33 Charles Kindrick, “Nicaragua Canal in Plain Sight” New Orleans Times Picayune, November 17, 1895, p. 26.

34 Fry, “John Tyler Morgan’s Southern Expansionism,” 337.

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southern expansionism. Control of the Central American isthmus would directly benefit the

region and allow it to gain economic independence.

Related to the push for a Central American canal was the desire to have a strong military

to maintain control of the waterway and protect the United States’ overseas markets. As a result,

both the Atlanta and Nashville expositions were heavy in displays of American military might.

At the fairs, the United States Government Exhibit consisted mostly of military displays.

Moreover, a year before war with Spain, the Tennessee Centennial became the first world’s fair

to organize and maintain a Military Department. Consisting of forty-eight acres within the

exposition grounds, the Military Department set up a model camp in which real soldiers lived.

The Kentucky State Troops, a battalion of the Sixth U.S. Infantry, a squadron of the Third U.S.

Cavalry, and the Fifth U.S. Regiment of Infantry made the exposition home. In addition,

National Guards from throughout the nation came and stayed at the camp. Beyond the actual

presence of military encampments, five “sham battles” occurred during the exposition.35

The sham battles at the Tennessee Centennial were one of its most popular features with

thousands of visitors coming to take in the spectacle [Figure 15: Sham Battle]. In August

businesses closed at noon to allow everyone to see the battle.36 The battles recreated the horror

and terror of war but made it safe for consumption. “It will be in sham, but yet real in

appearance,” reported the Nashville Banner. “At least some of the men who will engage the

battle have seen real fighting and know its terrors.”37 The Improved Order of Red Men, a white

35 Justi, Official History, 320-326. For the way in which the U.S. War Department and U.S. Army actively worked to increase militarism and support the army during the Progressive Era see Roger Possner, The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era, 1900-1914 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2009).

36 “Details of the Battle” Nashville Banner, August 13, 1897, p. 1.

37 “Just Before the Battle,” Nashville Banner, August 14, 1897, p. 1.

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middle class fraternal organization, acted the part of Native Americans by dressing in “redface”

and playing the part of the “enemy.” The Improved Order understood itself as preserving

America’s native heritage in the face of a vanishing native population. In the case of the

Tennessee Centennial the Improved Order reenacted this vanishing at the hands of the U.S.

military.38

Sensationalized re-creations such as sham battles allowed audiences to know vicariously

the experience of the victims—with the full advantage that all could emerge from the

performance unscathed. By re-creating battles in a real yet benign setting, fairgoers experienced

the terrible events of war. The spectacle and implicit acknowledgement of control allowed the

viewer to have an emotional and physical detachment from the events that plagued other people

and not themselves. Recalling her time at the exposition, Margaret Thompson remembered the

military encampments and battles as a significant aspect of the fair: “You see this was just before

the Spanish American War.” The performance of disaster spectacle confirmed a utopia in which

pain and suffering were mere illusions, tricks performed in the mechanical age. The military

displays and marshal spirit of the Tennessee Centennial was a part of the “psychological

preparation” of fairgoers for the adventurism of a nascent U.S. imperialism.39

The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions were in many ways re-

articulations of a southern dream of expansion and acquisition. In the immediate decades after

38 “Whoop, Whoop, Big Injuns,” Nashville Banner, August 7, 1897, p. 3; Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 65. See also Theda Perdue’s chapter on representations of natives at the Cotton States exposition. Perdue, “Vanishing Indians,” Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 53-95.

39 Margaret Campbell Lipscomb Thompson, interviewed by George Paine and Ophelia Paine, July 10 & 19, 1976, digitized June 1, 2006, audio recording, Tennessee Centennial Project: Oral History, Nashville Public Library, Nashville, TN; John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York: Penguin Books, 1976); John F. Kasson, Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century (New York: Hill & Wang, 1978); Possner, The Rise of Militarism in the Progressive Era, 3.

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the Civil War, white elite southerners, while continuing to view their region through a global

lens, put aside calls for the acquisition of Cuba and other racially hierarchical Latin American

republics. However, after the much-publicized failures of importing Chinese, Italian, and

Scandinavian laborers to solve the region’s “labor problem,” New South ideologues again looked

to the “American Mediterranean” for a compliant and tractable labor force.40 The Atlanta and

Nashville fairs positioned the South as essential to the new American expansionism sweeping the

nation. In the view of the expositions, the U.S. South would once again be on the frontier of an

American empire.

Recently historian Eric Love has questioned the role of racism in formulating U.S.

empire. Rather than encouraging expansionism, Love argues that late nineteenth century racial

science discouraged territorial acquisition. A belief in the United States as a white republic

caused many to be suspicious of and resist the acquisition of Haiti, Hawaii, and Cuba. While

Love’s critique of U.S. imperial historiography is useful, he overstates his case. Belief in the

superiority of the Anglo-Saxon “race” was implicit in late nineteenth century expansionism. That

anti-imperialists would use the rhetoric of race to argue against expansionism suggests the ways

in which racism was the lingua franca on both sides of the debate. The role that racism played in

supporting imperial expansion is no more clear than in the world’s fairs’ anthropological exhibits

and villages. As Robert Rydell has shown, the hierarchy of races established at the fairs by 40 Guterl, American Mediterranean, 155-156. See also Jean Ann Scarpaci, “Immigrants in the New South: Italians in Louisiana’s Sugar Parishes, 1880 – 1910,” Labor History (Spring 1975): 165-183; Lucy M. Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South: A People Without a History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984), 131; Donna Rae Gabaccia, Militants and Migrants: Rural Sicilians Become American Workers (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 85-86, 103; Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor, and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 148, 178; and Rick Halpern, “Solving the ‘Labor Problem’: Race, Work, and the State in the Sugar Industries of Louisiana and Natal, 1870-1910,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30:1 (March 2004): 19-40.

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anthropological and ethnological displays confirmed America’s moral duty to the ‘lowly’ people

of the world. With a new authority grounded in universities, scientists and anthropologists

promoted social struggle and imperial adventure as essential parts of the evolutionary process

that accompanied progress.41

Rydell and the scholars that followed him have so laid bear the imperial underpinnings of

anthropological displays and villages at world’s fairs that it is redundant to fully examine the

ethnographical exhibits of the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions. In their

replications of the World’s Columbian exposition, the Atlanta and Nashville fairs confirmed the

imperial rhetoric surrounding such displays. Anthropologists William John McGee and William

H. Holmes, essential to forming new methods of display that confirmed global racial hierarchies

at the World’s Columbian, were also involved in the anthropological exhibits at the Atlanta and

Nashville fairs.42 What is most salient to this chapter and dissertation, however, is the ways in

which anthropological exhibits underpinned and undermined New South imperial culture.43

The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial’s Government Buildings featured exhibits

from the Smithsonian Institution. For a region lacking in museums and libraries, the Smithsonian

41 Eric Love, Race Over Empire: Racism and U.S. Imperialism, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

42 Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair: The 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 25, 39.

43 For scholarly work that examines the intersections of race, empire, and anthropology at nineteenth century world’s fairs see Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851-1939 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988); James Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Lee D. Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair; Loren Kruger, ““White Cities,” “Diamond Zulus,” and the “African Contribution to Human Advancement”: African Modernities and the World’s Fairs,” TDR: The Drama Review 51:3 (Fall 2007): 19-45.

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brought southern fairgoers the recent advances in anthropology and racial science. Its goal was to

“illustrate the methods by which Science controls, classifies, and studies great accumulations of

material objects, and uses these as a means for the discovery of truth.” In doing so the exhibit’s

organizers hoped fairgoers would recognize “the value of museums as agencies for public

enlightenment, and thus to encourage the formation of public museums in the cities of the

South.”44 With science and technology as the new site of truth and meaning, the Smithsonian

presented a factually grounded hierarchy of the world’s peoples.

Although the exhibits of the Smithsonian were not displayed sequentially, they were to be

studied, according to the official catalogue, in a sequence creating a teleological narrative of

progress. It divided the world into four types of people: black, brown-red, yellow, and white.

Each “type” was represented by a collection of mannequins “intended to illustrate the physical

character and the ethnical costumes” of the races. For instance, an American Indian of the

“Jivaro stock of Peru” was costumed in an “apron of feathers of tropical birds upon a foundation

bark cloth, anklets, etc., of seeds, beetle wings, and teeth of monkey and puma.”45 Frequently,

contemporary artifacts were displayed alongside prehistoric finds. In doing so, the Smithsonian

denied foreign peoples coevality with modern Americans. The material culture of contemporary

Native Americans was displayed alongside European prehistoric pottery of the Neolithic and

Bronze Ages.46 In Nashville, fairgoers took in models of different races’ brains accompanied by

a phrenological exhibit of a series of skulls “illustrating the diversity of form found in various

44 The Exhibit of the Smithsonian Institution at the Cotton States Exposition (Washington, DC: Published for the Smithsonian Institution, 1895).

45 Official Catalogue of the Cotton States, 194-195.

46 Official Catalogue of the Cotton States, 205.

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races of man.”47 In a region where social hierarchy was divided into a biracial system, the

Smithsonian’s displays of foreign peoples as “primitive” confirmed the social order of the New

South. At the Smithsonian exhibit white southerners were witness to their own superiority. The

expositions’ displays of modernity and progress validated the New South program of

industrialization and racial boundaries. The exhibits of “black types” confirmed the supposed

benefits given to the region’s African Americans. No matter their present economic and social

standing, the Smithsonian indicated that blacks in America were uplifted from a primitive state.

While the Smithsonian exhibit represented the seriousness of scientific inquiry, it was

intimately connected to the pleasures and entertainment of the Midway. If the Smithsonian

presented an ordered view of racial progress and development, the Midway’s villages presented

fairgoers with the chaotic reality of foreign peoples and offered them a chance to take their new

knowledge and apply it to living subjects. “The visitor who had examined the series of figures

from the Smithsonian Institution, representing the various types of man” noted Walter Cooper in

his official history of the Cotton States, “could see many of them in very live flesh and blood by

taking a turn through the Midway.”48 Both the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial’s

Midways featured Chinese, Japanese, and German Villages alongside the ubiquitous Streets of

Cairo. Atlanta featured a Dahomey Village but the West Africans did not make it to Nashville.

Although the ethnological villages provided a more consumable and pleasurable version of the

Smithsonian they often served to undermine the order of the imperial modern. Actors and

“imported” natives frequently decided to not go along with the act. Like the Philippine village

47 Justi, Official History, 185.

48 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 89.

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nine years later at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Atlanta’s Chinese Village

destabilized imperial order.49

Kee Owyang, a Chinese national who worked in the Chinese department of a Wall Street

bank, ran the Chinese Village at the Cotton States. The Atlanta Constitution described him as a

“prosperous business man with up-to-date principles and a thorough collegiate education” who

dressed in the “American style” with “clothes of the very latest cut, and a derby hat of the most

recent shape and fashion.”50 From the beginning, Kee Owyang did not fit the stereotype of a

Chinese laborer familiar to southern fairgoers. Kee was a modern and Americanized immigrant

who had found success in New York. By the opening of the fair, however, any notion that

Chinese migrants might be sophisticated moderns was tempered by the arrival of two hundred

and five Chinese, thirty-six of whom were “beauties” “imported directly from the Celestial

Empire by way of Vancouver.”51

The arrival of the Chinese caused a stir in Atlanta. Despite multiple schemes in the

postwar period to bring Chinese labor to the South, the Chinese, as Matthew Guterl rightly points

out, “were rarely much more than an abstract or theoretical proposition.”52 Twenty-five hundred

men and boys crowded Union Depot to catch glimpse of the arriving villagers, many hoping to

see the “Chinese beauties.” When the women emerged from the train a group of Atlantan men

followed them, while the Chinese men and boys lined the station to walk out of the depot in an

49 For example, Paul Kramer has demonstrated the ways in which the Philippine village and exhibit at the St. Louis world’s fair “unhinged” the presentation of empire. Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901-1905” Radical History Review (Winter 1999).

50 “Kee Owyang Here” Atlanta Constitution, March 6, 1895, p. 9.

51 “205 Chinese Arrive” Atlanta Constitution, September 15, 1895, p.14; Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 90.

52 Guterl, American Mediterranean, 167.

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orderly manner. “The average Atlanta Chinese is almost an American in comparison with the

Chinese as they appear fresh and rank from their native country,” reported the Constitution.

“Many of the men, all of them with pigtails, looked like coolies, while others appeared to be

Chinese of education.” After marching to the exposition, the Chinese were “locked in” the

exposition grounds. Despite the enthusiasm of Atlanta’s white citizens, reports surfaced

immediately that the Chinese beauties were brought to Atlanta to be sold.53

From the start Atlanta’s small Chinese community was upset over the arrival of the

Chinese villagers. The Constitution reported that they were “excited, indignant, and suspicious”

of the newcomers. The community hired a lawyer to give counsel and “watch the movement of

the imported colony.” They claimed that the women brought as actresses, waiters, and “models

of beauty” were to be sold after the show. Using the 1882 exclusion and deportation act,

Atlanta’s Chinese argued that the villagers should be sent back to China immediately.54 In

October Lum Ling, a local Atlanta laundry man, filed a writ against the managers of the show,

arguing that at least nine of the Chinese beauties had been brought to the city as prostitutes in

violation of anti-Chinese laws. Atlanta’s judiciary did not know what to make of the increasing

tension between the city’s Chinese community and the show. On October 8, nine of the Chinese

beauties along with Kee Owyang and a Leon Lam were arrested and brought before the court.

They were released, however, after a government official believed the case to be the result of

spurned advances. The Atlanta Constitution reported that motives of the case were “jealousy and

revenge” after Ling and a few other men offered to marry the Chinese beauties and were refused

they charged that the beauties had been “brought to this country for immoral purposes.” At the

same time, Atlanta’s white community became angry with the village. A group of Atlantan males

53 “205 Chinese Arrive,” p.14.

54 “Maids of China” Atlanta Constitution, September 20, 1895, p. 5.

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were publicly embarrassed when they found out that the female actors they were flirting with in

the Chinese theatre were actually young boys. In the end, the local judge ruled that the women

came voluntarily and were allowed to stay at the exposition.55

Things remained quiet through the end of October until tension erupted again in late-

November when twenty women from the Village were sent away, presumably to San Francisco.

The Constitution believed that they disappeared to avoid appearing in court but Kee told the

paper that it was too cold in Atlanta and he had too many villagers on his payroll. Once again

Lum Ling, now Atlanta’s Chinese de facto leader, signed an affidavit reasserting that the women

were brought to Atlanta for immoral purposes. The Constitution now wondered if a U.S. attorney

should become involved in the case as its legal questions were of “national importance” and the

complications were tied directly to “the Chinese importation laws.” Despite the Constitution’s

suggestion of federal involvement, the U.S. attorney’s office decided not to take action citing

that the Kee and Lam’s contract “stipulated that the beauties could leave the exposition before

the close of the year” and that “nothing in the movements of the beauties was found to be

suspicious, or in anyway obnoxious to the statute.”56 By December most of the Chinese villagers

had decamped to New Orleans believing an exposition was to be held there.57

Like Atlanta the Tennessee Centennial also featured a Chinese Village and given the

New Orleans Times Picayune’s assertion that the villagers were “professional exposition people”

and that the Nashville village was run by Tom Yuen, President of the Chinese Merchants’

55 “Beauty in Bondage” Atlanta Constitution, October 9, 1895, p. 7; “Tough on Atlanta Chinamen” Atlanta Constitution, October 11, 1895, p. 5; “Back to the Midway” Atlanta Constitution, October 13, 1895, p. 17.

56 “The Beauties Gone” Atlanta Constitution, November 25, 1895, p. 10; “Whither Beauties?” Atlanta Constitution, November 26, 1895, p. 7; “To San Francisco” Atlanta Constitution, November 27, 1895, p. 7.

57 “Midway Mongolians” New Orleans Times Picayune, December 12, 1895, p. 3.

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Exposition Company, it is likely that many of the villagers were the same entertainers. Unlike

Atlanta, however, the Chinese Village avoided controversy [Figure 16: Chinese Village].

Indeed, the Centennial was more open to Chinese visitors who were of an “ethnological interest”

to fairgoers. The Nashville Banner reported that Chinese villagers could often be found in the

Woman’s Building “inspecting every nook and corner and jabbering and laughing, seeming

unaware of the interest they themselves are exciting.” Such integration allowed Nashville

fairgoers to observe and compare both races. “It is wondered what these men from a nation

where women are but little better than slaves think as they view the Woman’s building with its

rare exhibits of woman’s skill and genius, and contemplate the freedom their [American] brother

gives the woman,” pondered the Banner.58

Although the Chinese Villages’ presented an image of Chinese as unsophisticated coolie

laborers, they also demonstrated China as a nation with a rich and cultured history. When

dressed in costumes of “fine silk” and “resplendent colors” the villagers challenged southerners

who had only seen Chinese in “ordinary everyday working costume.”59 Through dragon parades

and traditional Chinese theatre and music, the Chinese Village presented a sophisticated yet

ancient culture.60 At the same time, local Christians took the opportunity to convert Chinese

villagers “away from Confucius to Christ.”61 Placing Chinese sophistication in the past, the

Chinese Villages suggested the ways in which contemporary Chinese were an unprogressive and

degenerate people. Reduced to the level of “coolies” and existing on the margins of southern

58 “Midway Mongolians,” p. 3; Justi, Official History, 212; Nashville Banner, May 14, 1897, p. 7.

59 “A Little Boy From China” Nashville Banner, June 30, 1897, p. 1.

60 E. G. D., “Nashville’s Exposition,” New York Times, June 20, 1897, p. 17.

61 “To Teach Them of the Christ” Nashville Banner, June 28, 1897, p. 1.

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society, southern Chinese Americans were denied the sophisticated high culture of their

ancestors.

The experience of the Chinese Village at the expositions demonstrates the unstable nature

of Jim Crow modernity and empire in the late nineteenth century South. Beginning in the 1870s

southern planters experimented with the use of coolie labor to replace black labor. However, by

the time of the fairs, most of the original Chinese labor had migrated off the fields and into the

South’s cities, becoming owners of laundry and grocer businesses.62 The story of the Chinese

community’s reaction to the Chinese Village in Atlanta mirrors other attempts by southern

Chinese Americans to navigate the biracial system of the South. Largely freed from manual labor

but not fully accepted into southern society, Chinese Americans operated in an “in-between

space.” They were constantly aware of the need to identify as white and disavow blackness at the

same time as the white community grouped them with blacks but allowed them more

maneuverability. This duality of identity created deep anxieties within the southern Chinese

American community.63 When confronted by the Chinese Village, with its underpinnings of

anthropological racialism, Atlanta Chinese rose to defend their space. Having carved a hard-won

niche in the highly racialized environment of late nineteenth century Atlanta, the city’s Chinese

were wary of newcomers who upset the precarious balance of race. Using the very laws meant to

exclude their countrymen from entering the United States, they criticized the Chinese Village’s

depiction of China as a racially degenerate country whose glory resided in the past. If Jim Crow

empire was supposed to resolve the tensions of a multiracial society, the experience of the

62 See Cohen, Chinese in the Post-Civil War South; Jung, Coolies and Cane; and Halpern, “Solving the ‘Labor Problem.’”

63 James W. Loewen, The Mississippi Chinese: Between Black and White (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Leslie Bow, “Racial Interstitiality and the Anxieties of the ‘Partly Colored’: Representations of Asians under Jim Crow” Journal of Asian American Studies 10:1 (Feb., 2007): 1-30.

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Chinese Village in Atlanta disrupted and challenged its ability to do so. Jim Crow, based on a

biracial order, was undermined in the multiracial fluidity of the anthropological villages. In a

very real sense, the Atlanta Chinese community defended its “in-betweeness.” On the Midway,

there were indications that Jim Crow modernity did not translate smoothly to a Jim Crow

empire.64

In the end, Atlanta’s Highest Board of Award concluded that the “international character

of the Exposition is not its principal feature.”65 Despite their rhetoric and notwithstanding the

global economic importance of southern cotton, the expositions’ in Atlanta and Nashville

confirmed the region as insignificant in international relations. Nevertheless, the Cotton States

and Tennessee Centennial demonstrate that the South in the 1890s was not inward looking. New

South ideologues understood the region through a global framework. Foreign markets and

territory for a Central American canal were needed if the South was to reach its economic

potential. Everyday southerners took great interest in the displays of the Smithsonian exhibits

and the anthropological villages of the Midways were the most popular features of the fairs.

Despite not becoming international spaces, the expositions in Atlanta and Nashville did

64 Alternatively, Theda Perdue argues plausibly that the Chinese Village’s “beauties” and Kee challenged the Chinese Exclusion Act. In this view, Kee operated a scheme by which some of the Chinese Villagers were able to integrate into Atlanta’s community, while others returned to China. The exclusion act also specifically targeted the migration of Chinese women. Again, Perdue, argues that the Chinese Village could have been used as clever subterfuge to get Chinese women into America. Later in his life Kee openly attacked U.S. immigration policies as a violation of treaties and international law. For Perdue, the Chinese “beauties” saga is representative of a terrified local Chinese community distancing itself from nativist Atlantans’ desire to see the barring of all Chinese from the city. See Theda Perdue, Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 109-110. For the role of exclusion acts in creating American identity as “white” see Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration During the Exclusion Era, 1882-1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); and Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign People at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000).

65 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 75.

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contribute to the rise of U.S. empire. In presenting a mostly peaceful and accommodating Jim

Crow modernity, the expositions provided the blueprint for a Jim Crow empire.

The concern that the U.S. Constitution allowed for the incorporation of foreign territories

and therefore foreign people of color into the United States as equals was debated throughout the

imperial period. As Amy Kaplan has made clear, the Supreme Court’s 1901 ruling on the

territorial jurisdiction of Puerto Rico reflected a deep-seated fear that U.S. aggression abroad

endangered America at home. “Inverting the role of colonizer and colonized,” writes Kaplan,

“the Court imagined a nightmare scenario that turned the acquisition of Puerto Rico and other

territories into the foreign colonization of the United States, an act that could undo its sovereign

government, dismember its body, enslave its citizens, and dissolve its familial bonds.”66 In what

has become known as the Insular Cases, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution did not

follow the flag and that occupied foreign territory, such as Puerto Rico, was “foreign to the

United States in a domestic sense.” While Puerto Rico could be considered within the domestic

sphere of the U.S. “in terms of the rights and privileges conferred by the Constitution, the court

excluded Puerto Rico from that same sphere.”67 The Supreme Court’s decision in the Insular

Cases did not defy the logic of the late nineteenth century. For many Americans the South was

foreign in a domestic sense. Its largely rural landscape, Lost Cause devotees, and large African

American population made it incongruent with the rest of the nation. With the arrival of what C.

Vann Woodward called “the Mississippi Plan,” increasing segregation laws, and the Court’s own

ruling on Plessy v. Ferguson, the Jim Crow South had proven the way in which a people, in this

66 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 11.

67 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 2-3.

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case African Americans, could be considered domestic citizens at the same time being foreign in

the rights and privileges conferred.68 Jim Crow modernity transitioned into Jim Crow empire.

Many northern Republicans viewed the Reconstruction South as a colonial space. The

architects of Reconstruction borrowed liberally from European imperial administration and in

doing so the South became, as Jennifer Greeson notes, a “training ground for U.S. administrative

policies that would later be put into practice overseas.”69 Following Reconstruction the South

remained a place for experiments in imperial rule. As Europe expanded its reach across the globe

and the U.S. looked beyond its borders, the South’s racial troubles were viewed as a part of a

new world imperial order. The color line became a transnational concern for American, British,

and South African imperialists, and they looked to each other for the solution to the so called

“race problem.”70 As Natalie Ring makes clear, “[f]oreign visitors traveled to the U.S. South,

confident that what they found there would enable them to restructure the racial systems in South

Africa and the British colonies.”71 And what better place to take in the South’s solution to the

race problem than at a World’s Fair?72

Viewed as a colonial space, the expositions’ participation of African Americans in

separate Negro Buildings is significant. Late-nineteenth century empire was not a “color-coded

school map with fixed, clearly bounded units,” notes historian Laura Ann Stoler. Instead it was

68 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 100; Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness: New South Fiction, Education, and the Rise of Jim Crow Colonialism, 1865-1920 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 109. Peter Schmidt notes that the Mississippi Plan was first “field tested” in Hawaii and not elsewhere in the South.

69 Greeson, Our South, 236.

70 Ring, Problem South, 179.

71 Ring, Problem South, 214-215. See also Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness, 13; and Harilaos Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World, 24.

72 Theda Perdue makes a similar point in Race and the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition, 137.

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mobile and fluid, its polities were protean “rather than fixed taxonomies.” A few hundred acres

in Atlanta or Nashville could be, if not equal, than a similar imperial space as Manila Bay in

1898: a synecdoche of empire.73 Northern visitors and New South boosters were witnesses to

imperial space at the fairs. Beyond the much-analyzed anthropological villages, the Negro

Buildings presented a working form of imperial social order.

From their inception the organizers of Atlanta and Nashville viewed the expositions as

teaching the rest of the nation. Rhetoric surrounding both fairs contended that the South was a

purer form of America than the corruptible North and West. Untouched by the “labor and

socialist disturbances that an element of foreign immigrants had made more violent, as well as

the congested condition of society and trade,” wrote Georgia Governor Atkinson, the South has

“left intact an American civilization of the highest order and the purest character, with many

broad acres of land, which the experience of the North has taught us to offer only to a select and

desirable class of immigrants.”74 Southern racial codes and distrust of outsiders had protected the

region from the corrupting influence of inferior foreigners went this logic.75 What better region,

then, to lead the nation in control of foreign territories and inferior people.

73 Likewise, Kristin Hoganson notes “that we do not need to look overseas to find evidence of empire, that the domestic realm of the United States has itself been an arena of imperial contact and contestation.” Laura Ann Stoler, “Intimidations of Empire: Predicament of the Tactile and Unseen” in Stoler, ed., Haunted By Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9-10; Hoganson, “Buying into Empire: American Consumption at the Turn of the Twentieth Century” in Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, Alfred W. McCoy & Francisco A. Sacarano (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 248.

74 Atkinson, “The Atlanta Exposition,” 390.

75 For example the Brooklyn Eagle’s handbook to the Cotton States exposition boasted that Atlanta was “an American town, through and through. The signs on the shops are American, the policemen are Americans, and will give civil answers to civil questions, there are American firemen in the engine house, the American speech is heard on the streets and in the market places…and American morality prevails in both private and public life.” Hand Book to the Cotton States and International Exposition: Being a Faithful Account of What a Representative

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By taking a transnational perspective on African American involvement at the fairs, it is

clear that Jim Crow modernity presented solutions to the problems of colonial subjects. For the

organizers of the expositions the Negro Buildings offered proof of the ways in which the white

South corrected the mistakes of Reconstruction. Like colonial natives who were “left to battle for

[themselves],” African Americans, according to Herman Justi, were ill prepared for the

responsibilities of suffrage and office holding. For Justi, the Negro Building was instructive of

what could be achieved when an ostensibly free population was denied political rights in order to

concentrate on their industrial development. “Great nations have risen,” Justi claimed,

“flourished, and extended their empire without consulting the masses—without popular

elections.” The Negro Building was proof of what could be achieved when an “inferior” people

were included in industrial and commercial progress but denied the fundamental rights of

citizenship. “There is work for all,” concluded Justi, “there are offices for only a very few.”76

Five years later the Platt Amendment allowing the U.S. to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs

was a direct result of viewing Cuban identity as black. As Amy Kaplan notes, the “Cubans’

perceived racial identity as Negro was used as an argument about their incapacity for self-

government and their need for supervision.”77 The expositions demonstrated the success in

of the Brooklyn Eagle Saw When He Visited the Fair (Atlanta: Brooklyn Daily Eagle Information Bureau, 1895), 6. Microfilm. Reel 126: 3. National History Museum Library, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC.

76 Justi, Official History, 193. In the case of Atlanta, Charles Kindrick in the Times Picayune made sure his readers understood that black progress was achieved only at the behest of whites: “His [African Americans] destinies are linked with the white people of the south, and he should accept the opportunity, leave off the agitations for social equality which do him harm, give us his ambition to sit in high political places, and take his station where he belongs in the ranks of development and industrial growth.” Kindrick, “The Negro Building at the Exposition” New Orleans Times Picayune, October 22, 1895, p. 12.

77 Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 136-137.

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exclusionary programs centered on race. Fairgoers were witness to the wonders of the industrial

and mechanical age within a racially hierarchical space.

Making connections between the South and the world, the expositions’ presentation of

black progress was viewed in an international context. “While the Exposition was not created to

teach the world better,” noted the Nashville Banner, “the enterprise does afford an opportunity

for the Negro to teach the world a great lesson of themselves.”78 Likewise, the Atlanta

Constitution reported that the “negro’s part in the exposition has attracted the attention of the

whole civilized world, and one of the greatest results of the great show is the advancement which

the negro is making in thought and life.”79 Walter Cooper wrote of the Negro Building: “It was a

sociological study, and ethnological fact marking the progress of an important branch of the

human race. It was in concrete the largest, and first announcement in comprehensive form, of the

results of a gigantic experiment involving millions of human beings and forecasting the future,

not only of these but many more millions of the same race on other continents.”80 The

experiment and success of controlling and limiting black freedom in the Jim Crow period made

the South an important region to study for the development of overseas colonies.

Central to the argument that the South was fertile training ground for empire was the

success of black technical schools. At the Centennial’s Emancipation Day ceremonies Booker T.

Washington placed the progress of African Americans in the South within a global framework.

“The results come to the negro as to all races,” spoke Washington, “by beginning at the bottom

and working gradually up toward the highest civilization and accomplishments.”81 Like

78 “Annent the Centennial” Nashville Banner, June 5, 1897.

79 “Their Fathers’ Land” Atlanta Constitution, November 27, 1895, p. 12.

80 Cooper, The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, 57.

81 Quoted in Justi, Official History, 202.

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Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, the Negro Buildings’ displayed commercial, agricultural, and

industrial progress without openly demanding civil or social rights. The institutions of education

represented in the buildings confirmed their role in “civilizing” the freed slaves. Hampton

School, which was present at both fairs and the blueprint for African American technical schools,

was modeled on its founder Samuel Chapman Armstrong’s experience in colonial Hawaii.82

Industrial education, like that presented by Negro Buildings, was viewed as essential to bringing

civilization and Christianity to colonial citizens.

At the Cotton States’ Congress on Africa, white Methodist Bishop William Taylor argued

that first task for missionary work in Africa was “industrial education which will develop and

utilize indigenous resources and create self-support for all concerned.”83 The bourgeois displays

of technological and scientific progress by the African American elite confirmed the success of

the imperial project. Here the former primitives of slavery were transformed into modern citizens

that did not disrupt the region’s racial and political balance. African American missionaries and

settlers argued that plantation labor was necessary to bestow the blessings of civilization and

industry on Africans.84 “The industrial, intellectual, moral and spiritual progress of the colored

people in America is a prophecy,” wrote Professor E. L. Parks of the Negro exhibit, “both of

82 There was a global circulation of technical education pedagogy in the late-nineteenth century. Armstrong’s experience in colonial Hawaii informed his Hampton Institute which formed the inspiration for Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Tuskegee, in turn, would inspire technical schools in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. See Adam Nelson, “Education: Introduction” in Colonial Crucible, 134; Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 105-108.

83 William Taylor, “Self-Supporting Missions in Africa” in Africa and the American Negro: Congress on Africa, Atlanta, Dec. 13-15, 1895. J. W. E. Bowen, ed (Atlanta, 1896), 154.

84 James Campbell, Songs of Zion: The African Methodist Episcopal Church in the United States and South Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 88-89. Campbell concludes that “it is difficult to find any evidence of genuine missionary activity by the AME church in Liberia.”

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what they will become and will do for the redemption of their fatherland, and also of what the

native African is capable of becoming.”85 In the years following the expositions, Booker T.

Washington and his technical school model became active participants in the African imperial

project. Washington considered Africa to be “backwards” and “in need of civilization” and

thought colonial powers could uplift Africans.86 African Americans in the New South were on

the vanguard of this movement. The success of the Negro Building portended to the model’s

success outside the United States.87

The expositions also advertised the power of the plantation and by extension the judiciary

to maintain the color line. The plantation economies of the United States’ colonial possessions

mimicked the plantation South. A reporter for the Times Picayune noted the Cotton States’ “field

of corn, where negroes were gathering fodder” as he left the fairgrounds. Just outside the fair he

saw “two droves of men, dressed in black and white stripes, and chained together. They were

Georgia convicts, who had been working at the exposition grounds.”88 In Nashville, the

Agriculture Building featured a colossal painting that pictured a cotton field worked by African

85 E. L. Parks, “The Stewart Missionary Foundation for Africa and the Purpose of the Congress” in Africa and the American Negro, 10.

86 Sven Beckert, “From Tuskegee to Togo: The Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton” Journal of American History 92:2 (Sep. 2005), 526; Andrew Zimmerman, Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); see also Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission’”; Williard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); José-Manuel Navarro, Creating Tropical Yankees: Social Science Textbooks and U.S. Ideological Control in Puerto Rico, 1898-1908 (New York: Routledge, 2002).

87 In 1910 there were 350,000 Filipinos engaged in industrial work at Philippine primary schools. By 1924 that number had jumped to 900,000. Glenn Anthony May, “The Business of Education in the Colonial Philippines, 1909-30” in Colonial Crucible, 151, 152-153. See also Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission,’” 439.

88 “Bright Women at the Atlanta Fair” New Orleans Times Picayune, September 27, 1895, p. 12.

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Americans. Justi recalled that the picture was a must-see of the exposition and that the rows of

real cotton “gave the air of reality to the scene…and caused many a visitor to ask immediately on

entering the grounds, ‘Where is the picture of the cotton field that I hear so much about?’”

Located outside the building was “a practical object-lesson in cotton growing.” 89 The intention

of the exhibit was to demonstrate the most modern means of growing and cultivating cotton.

However, an unstated lesson was that while white farmers reaped the profits, African Americans

conducted the labor. Like the late-nineteenth century’s plantation fiction, the expositions’

working cotton and tobacco fields allowed all Americans to become white southerners. If the

nation was to solve the race problem at home and abroad, the exposition’s provided clear

examples of how to do so: black labor, free or coerced, supported industrial progress. In the

twentieth century the plantation model became essential to managing race in the industrial

metropolises of the North and foreign territories.90

In all these ways, the Negro Buildings and black participation at the expositions

confirmed a southern racial order that uplifted people of color, while denying them the rights of

citizenship. At the same time, although supporting the language of civilization, there was room

to contest white narratives of progress. The Negro Buildings challenged an increasingly benign

remembrance of slavery. The progress represented confirmed the depths from which southern

African Americans had advanced. “The Negro, at the close of the war, was all that American

slavery would make any people, viz.: beastialized and animalized; ignorant, poor, crude, rude;

helpless, moneyless and thoughtless,” wrote Methodist minister and Gammon Theological

89 Justi, Official History, 361-362.

90 Wells, Romances of the White Man’s Burden, 89, 98; Davarian Baldwin, “Black Belts and Ivory Towers: The Place of Race in U.S. Social Thought, 1892-1948” Critical Sociology 30:2 (2004); and Land of Darkness: Race and the Making of Modern America (Forthcoming from Oxford University Press).

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Seminary professor, John W. E. Bowen, during the Cotton States exposition. “American slavery

was not a blessing; it was a curse. The good that came to the Negro (and there was good even in

so baneful contact) came in spite of slavery.”91 The Negro Buildings challenged and confirmed

the southern imperial modern. On the one hand, they validated Reconstruction and Jim Crow’s

redemptive narrative of uplift and philanthropy; on the other hand, they raised questions of why

African Americans were so “primitive” in the first place.92

Jim Crow modernity reflects what historian Paul Kramer has called the “politics of

recognition.” The South’s expositions, like colonial spaces, invited subjects, in this case African

Americans, to participate to the “extent that hegemonic authorities recognized [African

Americans’] capacities for discipline, political rationality, and self-government.” Like the

colonial Philippines studied by Kramer, Jim Crow modernity provided “a flexible ideological

basis for a calibrated mixture of empowerment and disenfranchisement.”93 Jim Crow modernity

in its flexibility provided a basis for Jim Crow empire. The “success” of southern race relations,

according to the expositions, could easily be applied to foreign people of color. As Peter Schmidt

argues, “Reconstruction narratives of ‘uplift’ were revised both to justify Jim Crow at home and

to persuade skeptical Americans that U.S. imperial destiny abroad meant the reconstruction of its

newly acquired colonies, with special emphasis on limited suffrage rights and new education

91 J. W. E. Bowen, “The Comparative Status of the Negro at the Close of the War and of To-day” in Africa and the American Negro, 163.

92 Bowen, “Comparative Status of the Negro at the Close of the War and To-day,” 163-169.

93 It should be noted that Kramer views this as an argument against a simple exportation model of race relations. While Kramer is right that race and empire are historically and locally contingent, he does not recognize the fluidity of the Jim Crow system, which is also contingent on time and space. It is the very lack of rigidity within Jim Crow modernity that allows it to be so easily translated to imperial space. Paul Kramer, “Race, Empire, and Transnational History” in Colonial Crucible, 201; Kramer, Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 18.

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systems.”94 While never exactly duplicated and contingent on time and space, racial segregation

became a key part of U.S. colonial practices after 1898. Jim Crow was no longer “regional and

southern.”95 The expositions in Atlanta and Nashville contributed to the nationalization and

internationalization of Jim Crow. Racial segregation and uplift at home became a part of a

“global imperial strategy of rule.”96 As C. Vann Woodward noted sixty years ago: “Events in the

Philippines soon indicated that the Mississippi Plan had become the American Way.”97

In the 1880s and 1890s black attitudes towards imperialism varied from antagonistic to

ambivalent to supportive. Prominent African Americans changed or held contradictory opinions

on expansionism throughout their lives. At the expositions, many southern African American

leaders aligned themselves with a civilizing discourse that supported the rhetoric of Anglo-Saxon

civilization. The Negro Buildings’ confirmed advancement through accommodation. The

displays of African American industry and achievement validated the rhetoric of technical

education as the path to progress both at home and in future colonies. International conferences

held by African American missionary and church organizations replicated white evangelists’

depictions of Africa as a heathen and primitive locale. In doing so, the Negro Buildings upheld

94 Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness, 13.

95 Schmidt, Sitting in Darkness, 110.

96 Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, 138.

97 Woodward, Origins of the New South, 325. See also Fry, “John Tyler Morgan’s Southern Expansionism,” 345-346; McWilliams, New South Faces the World, 66; Stecopoulos, Reconstructing the World, 24, 27.

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the potentiality of the Jim Crow modern in imperial space. African Americans, themselves,

vindicated the rhetoric of imperial uplift.98

Late nineteenth century missionary activity was an integral aspect of America’s

engagement with the outside world. Forming a new white nationalism based on Christian ethics

and proselytizing, Protestantism shifted missionary work from the postwar South to the world.

“The new, religiously inspired and highly racialized American nationalism on the home front,”

writes historian Edward Blum, “supported boldness in extending America’s economic, political,

and religious power over foreign peoples, and imperialism in turn further bolstered the sense that

the United States was God’s chosen nation.”99 In this new milieu African American missionaries

were viewed by both black and white clergy as essential to the civilizing and proselytizing of

Africa.100

Although some black missionaries, like Henry McNeal Turner, were emigrationists, most

saw participation in missions as a way to demonstrate their progress as racial subjects and claim

full American citizenship.101 Throughout its run the Cotton States hosted a variety of black

missionary conferences. The first was held in September when the Colored Baptist Foreign

98 Willard B. Gatewood, Jr., Black Americans and the White Man’s Burden, 1898-1903 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975); Kevin Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission’: Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism,” 433-453 in Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

99 Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005), 212.

100 James Campbell, Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 142; James Campbell, Songs of Zion, 96; M.C.B. Mason, “The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Evangelization of Africa” in Africa and the American Negro, 146.

101 Campbell, Middle Passages, 144; Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission,’” 435.

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Mission held its annual conference in Atlanta.102 The conference that attracted the most notice,

however, was Gammon Theological Seminary’s “Congress on Africa” held between December

13 and 15. Beginning in November the Constitution editorialized on the importance of the

congress. The paper promised an unflinching view of Africa: “Natives of Africa will speak of

their own land. Travelers will personally describe what they have seen. Missionaries from the

Dark Continent will set forth clearly the religious life of the people.”103 The Constitution

believed that it was up to the “American negro” to redeem the “Dark Continent” by bringing it

American civilization.104 However, the paper also hoped that this portrait of Africa would

discourage the “thousands of negroes in the south [that] have been sadly misled by false views

on Africa” and believed the continent suitable for emigration.105 The congress reinforced the

class bias of African American missions to Africa. The African American middle class could go

to Africa to save it while rural and working class blacks should stay and labor in the South.106

The Congress on Africa was considered the most important conference of the exposition

by both white and black observers. Although technically held outside the fairgrounds, it was

viewed as part of the Cotton States and the Constitution estimated that thousands attended both

102 “A Huge Assembly” Atlanta Constitution, September 26, 1895, p. 5.

103 “An African Prince” Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1895, p. 3.

104 Many African Americans also held this view. It was believed that beyond a historical connection, African Americans could more quickly acclimatize to the climate and diseases of Africa. See M. C. B. Mason, “The Methodist Episcopal Church and the Evangelization of Africa” in Africa and the American Negro, 145-148.

105 “An African Prince” Atlanta Constitution, November 3, 1895, p. 3.

106 Rust, “The Needs of Africans as Men” in Africa and the American Negro, 211. See also Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift Ideology as ‘Civilizing Mission,’” 450. On African American whistleblowers in Africa see Campbell, Middle Passages; and Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (Boston: Houghton Miffin, 1999).

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the congress and the fair.107 While the biracial congress was meant to promote the

“evangelization of Africa,” it was framed by the current scramble for the continent’s natural

wealth.108 Participants at the congress presented speeches not only on Christian missions but on

“African exploration, native peoples, languages and religion, and the opportunity, means for the

promotion, and progress of civilization [in Africa].”109 Speakers included ministers and bishops,

foreign dignitaries, white and black missionaries, and African philologists and explorers, such as

the celebrated Mary French-Sheldon. It also featured prominent black spokesmen such as Henry

Turner, John W. E. Bowen, Alexander Crummell, and T. Thomas Fortune. More than any other

aspect of the exposition, the Congress on Africa mobilized a language of civilization and uplift

of foreign people.

One of the highlights of the exposition was Orishetukeh Faduma, an “African prince” of

the Yoruba people of Sierra Leone and a graduate of Queens College and Yale University.

Unlike the much-disparaged Africans at the Dahomey Village, Atlanta’s white press fawned over

Faduma. He was representative of the progress that could be achieved in Africa, especially when

considering, if the Dahomey Village was a reference, how far Faduma had come. Faduma

supported the emigrationist cause. “The race, in order to be a race, must have individuality of its

own. This it cannot have if it is overshadowed by the white man’s,” quoted the Constitution of

Faduma’s speech. Reassuringly, Faduma did not believe that all African Americans were ready

for Africa, rather for the moment just “hardy pioneers.” Faduma, while supporting missionary

work in Africa, was also critical of European missions on his home continent. He argued that the

107 “An African Prince,” Atlanta Constitution, December 11, 1895, p. 9; “Ethiopia’s Hand,” Atlanta Constitution, December 14, 1895, p. 3.

108 Rev. Bishop I.W. Joyce, “Introduction” in Africa and the American Negro, 7.

109 E.L. Parks, “The Stewart Missionary Foundation for Africa and the Purpose of the Congress” in Africa and the American Negro, 10.

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goal was to Christianize Africa not Anglicize or Americanize it. Faduma denounced the ways

missionaries had suppressed “Native modes of thought, and all those peculiarities of language

and manner which ought to differentiate one race from another.” God created separate races for a

purpose, reasoned Faduma, and American missionaries should not attempt to replicate American

society in Africa.110

The general tenor of the congress, however, was that Africa was a primitive and heathen

land that needed to be saved. “The heathen African…eagerly yearn for that civilization which

they believe will elevate them and make them potential for good,” claimed Henry McNeal

Turner.111 First person testimony from converted Africans such as Faduma and Etna Holderness,

presented a before-and-after image of what Christian civilization brought, while testimony from

white missionaries confirmed the work of God in a supposedly godless land.112 Other speakers

testified to the benefits brought to Africa by American and European civilization. For example J.

C. Hartzell praised the benefits of European colonialism. Hartzell, a corresponding secretary for

the Freedmen’s Aid and Southern Education Society, believed in the power of white society to

transform African Americans. Likewise, H. K. Carroll, editor of the New York Independent,

argued that “[w]hat the Christian faith, Christian education, and Christian example have done for

the Negro in the United States, these influences can do for the Negro of Africa.”113 African

110 “On Darkest Africa” Atlanta Constitution, December 10, 1895, p. 12; “An African Prince” Atlanta Constitution, December 11, 1895, p. 9; “Ethiopia’s Hand” Atlanta Constitution, December 14, 1895, p. 3; “Efforts for Africa” Atlanta Constitution, December 15, 1895, p. 15; Oriahetukeh Faduma, “Religious Beliefs of the Yoruba People, West Africa,” 31-36 and “Success and Drawbacks to Missionary Work in Africa,” 128 in Africa and the American Negro.

111 H. M. Turner, “The American Negro and His Fatherland,” in Africa and the American Negro, 195.

112 On the power of before-and-after imager in the rhetoric of civilization see Laura Wexler, Tender Violence, 10.

113 H. K. Carroll, “The Negro in the Twentieth Century” in Africa and the American Negro, 161.

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American newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune framed the recent history of Africa as a continent

“rapidly subdued and its waste places made the habitation of civilized governments and its

savage inhabitants brought into contact and under the control of civilization.”114 Altogether the

congress, while open to the occasional dissenting voice, presented an image of Africa as a

dangerous, primitive, and heathen place desperate for the civilization and religion of America.

Engagement with Africa at the congress, however, did encourage a proto-black

nationalism. John H. Smyth, the ex-minster to Liberia, claimed that African Americans’ failure

to embrace Africa was part of the reason Africans were considered “degraded beings.” Smyth

called on blacks to embrace their African heritage: “you are descendants of African races and as

consequence…you are a separate and distinct people from Caucasian races.” It was time for

African Americans to gather “reliable data respecting our race in the fatherland, and thereby

awaken in you an interest and sincere desire for the well being of Africa and her races, for our

people, and for accurate information concerning the most ancient, and most mysterious of lands.”

In doing so, African Americans’ would regain their “Negro manhood” and create a preference of

their race “before all other races.”115 Likewise, in his opening address at the congress, W. P.

Thirkield, president of the Gammon Theological Seminary, argued that Africa had been

“cursed.” “In other centuries the curse was the stealing of Africans from Africa. Now, it is the

game among European nations of ‘shut your eyes and grab’ in their efforts to steal Africa from

the Africans.”116 Fortune, in the same paper he disparaged pre-colonial Africa, believed that

Africans would eventually absorb their colonizers and create an African “civilization whose

114 T. Thomas Fortune, “The Nationalization of Africa” in Africa and the American Negro, 200.

115 Hon. J. H. Smyth, “The African in Africa and the African in America” in Africa and the American Negro, 69, 82-83.

116 W. P. Thirkield, “Opening Remarks,” in African and the American Negro, 13.

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glory and whose splendor and whose strength shall eclipse all others.”117 The congress, while

overarchingly supporting the civilizationist cause, opened possibilities for critiques of such logic.

If African Americans were to rescue Africa questions needed to be raised regarding their

relationship to their ancestral “homeland.” For some, at least, this included a proto-black

nationalist perspective.

The multiple and divergent views on Africa and colonialism within the African American

community was made evident at the Congress on Africa. While some blacks supported the work

of Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold’s Congo, others believed that only African Americans could

save and civilize Africa. The white missionaries, philologists, and explorers at the congress all

took a negative but hopeful view of Africa. Confident in their own civilization’s remaking of

Africans through slavery and freedom, they saw Africa as a continent ripe for Christianity and

exploitation. Although some whites, such as J. W. Hamilton, Corresponding Secretary for the

Freedmen’s Aid Society, were critical of colonization and believed in equality, most at the

congress viewed it through the framework of European imperialism.118 African Americans’

embrace of the teleology of modern progress confirmed the power of Jim Crow modernity and

empire to transform colonial subjects into modern citizens. As historian James Campbell has

noted, African American missionaries believed that Christianity and “civilization” were

“universal principals toward which all people gravitated.” In this view, “spreading the gospel and

western civilization to Africa thus implied no violence toward African civilization but merely

speeded Africa along the path it was preordained to follow.”119 The southern black elite became

willing participants in the colonial project. Like the technical education they supported for the

117 Fortune, “The Nationalization of Africa” in Africa and the American Negro, 204.

118 J.W. Hamilton, “Occult Africa” in Africa and the American Negro, 175-185.

119 Campbell, Songs of Zion, 83.

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uplift of rural blacks, they viewed Africans as needing the guiding hand of the “better class.” Jim

Crow modernity and empire, then, was not simply imposed by whites on Africans. Many black

elite accepted and bought into its program of modernization and exclusion. In doing so, they

helped prepare the way for colonial enterprises.

In 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois predicted that the problem of the twentieth century would be

“the problem of the color line.”120 In few things has anyone been so right. Beginning in 1898 the

United States extended the color line across the globe. European nations’ embraced the line in

their own imperial adventures. From the violence of colonial rule at the beginning of the

twentieth century to the violence of liberation and civil rights in foreign and domestic space at

mid-century, the color line ruled a global imperial society. The Cotton States and International

Exposition and Tennessee Centennial Exposition played a small but significant part in cementing

the power of the color line. At the fairs, the color line was present in the seriousness of the white

cities’ Smithsonian exhibits, Negro Buildings, and conferences on Africa. It was present in the

crass commercialism of the Midway Plaisance. The color line, however, was flexible. African

American fairgoers attended all aspects of the fair and were treated to reduced discrimination. In

many ways, the fluidity of the color line, which occurred at the behest of whites, only confirmed

its power. “The point about segregation is not that it was a system of complete separation,”

writes historian Mark Smith, “the point is that whites derived their authority by defining when

and where sensory intimacy was permitted.”121 In few spaces but the liminal ones of the

expositions was this point so definitively made clear. Northern and a few European fairgoers

120 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Rockville: Arc Manor, 2008 [1903]), 9.

121 Mark M. Smith, How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 68.

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were witness to the power of Jim Crow modernity to transform and order a biracial society. The

fairs made clear the possibilities for the exportation of Jim Crow modernity as Jim Crow empire.

The South’s calls for an informal empire based on the marketability of consumer goods

and the exploitation of raw materials was consistent with United States’ imperialism. American

corporations viewed themselves as a part of a civilizing mission of the world. Like the Negro

Building’s representation of modern African American elites, these companies “produced a

narrative of progress – a temporally fluid view of culture and place – within which all people

were potential consumers and all nations potentially modern.”122 By establishing trade with Latin

American markets the effect on the South would be twofold. On the one hand, the South would

be able to assert greater commercial autonomy and release itself from the shackles of northern

merchants. On the other hand, its participation in a growing market empire placed it on the side

of the metropole and act as civilizer bringing primitive and heathen people U.S. commercial

goods.

At the fairs the southern African American elite embraced this civilizing discourse.

Buying into the progressive narrative of the late nineteenth century they welcomed technical

education both at home and abroad. In the expositions’ conferences on Africa, the black elite

presented a worldview that confirmed Africa as the “Dark Continent.” Although white

participants mostly took a negative view of the current state of Africa, African American

spokesmen, while certainly employing the language of civilization, opened doors to critiques of

both the U.S. slave system and the colonization of Africa. Never a homogenous group, the

African American elite at the expositions held a variety of views that were both compatible and

incompatible with Jim Crow modernity and empire. In the years following the expositions,

accommodation rhetoric declined and the proto-black nationalism articulated by a few gained 122 Domosh, American Commodities in an Age of Empire, 7.

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salience. In the end, however, most observers left the Cotton States exposition believing that

African Americans as a people supported the colonizing and civilizing of Africa.

The Jim Crow South did not simply transmit a biracial social order. As Natalie Ring,

Jennifer Greeson, and others have shown, the South was not isolated but intimately connected

within circuits of empire. Historian Clare Corbould has recently written, “‘Race’ was not

something exported out of the United States to the colonial periphery; rather, race was made by

empire just as empire was made by race.”123 The South was never an isolated region. It always

connected to transnational trends. New South ideologues believed that their version of a Jim

Crowed modernity could be useful in the expansion of United States empire. At the same time,

their biracial social order was informed by other colonizers’ experience with race. The late

nineteenth century was characterized by the circular travels of ideas on science, culture, and race.

These “Atlantic crossings,” of which world’s fairs were central components, made up a common

language of Euro-American empire and superiority. 124

The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial were just one small part of increasing web

of imperial ideas centered around the social hierarchy of race and modern industrial progress. Far

from being isolated, Atlanta, Nashville, and other New South cities were embedded in the matrix

of late nineteenth and early twentieth century empire: an empire in which colony affected

metropole as much as metropole affected empire. They are also indicative of the fractured nature

of U.S. empire. The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial challenge the notion of a fully

123 Clare Corbould, “Race and Imperial Identities: Introduction” in Colonial Crucible, 193.

124 For the “Atlantic crossings” of ideas see Daniel T. Rogers, Atlantic Crossing: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). For the way in which race was a contingent category in the imperial milieu see Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government. For a reevaluation of U.S. empire see Gretchen Murphy, Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line (New York: NYU Press, 2010), 6-7.

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formed and homogenous United States. Southerners asked different questions of empire, just as

empire asked different questions of southerners.

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Chapter 5. “The Legions in Blue and Gray”: Sectional Reconciliation at the Expositions

“There is a shallow idea, which neither Hill nor Grady ever entertained, that the men who could

wring victory from the jaws of death are somehow incapable of winning triumphs in the peaceful contest for industrial supremacy. It is a short-sighted man who rejects the light of the past.” -

The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated

June 24, 1897 began with rain and the weather did not let up throughout the day.

Standing shoulder-to-shoulder on the muddy streets of Nashville, ten thousand Confederate

veterans felt the dampness sink into their bodies. Thirty years earlier these men had experienced

far worse but now their bodies were old and frail. Despite the rain, they stood erect waiting for

the signal to march through Nashville to the great exposition just outside the city’s limits.

Nashville, home to the United Confederate Veterans, was the New South city most connected to

its past. If Sherman had erased Atlanta’s past, Nashville celebrated it alongside its New South

future. The gathering of fifty thousand veterans and their supporters from June 22 to 24 was

evidence of the way in which the old continued to reside in the new. Although performances of

Civil War memory at the Nashville and Atlanta expositions were celebrations of the South’s

past, they aimed to reconcile the nation.1

This chapter examines the performances of reconciliation at the Atlanta and Nashville The Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated (Atlanta, 1896), 7.

1 “Ardor Not Dampened By Rain,” Nashville Banner, June 24, 1897, p. 1; “The Reunion” Confederate Veteran V:7 (July 1897) in the Confederate Veteran Index. Volume V (Nashville, 1897), 339.

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expositions. These performances created a powerful cultural narrative that combined nationalism

with sectionalism to win northern capital to the South. Inviting northerners to witness the South’s

progress, the expositions based reconciliation on a developing Jim Crow modernity. The

celebration of the Lost Cause through Civil War reunions was central to the formation of

southern modernity in the late nineteenth century. At a time of nascent imperialism these

performances helped reunite the sections by rewriting the war as a patriotic disagreement over

states’ rights and its soldiers as exemplars of modern manliness. In doing so, the expositions

demonstrated the South’s progress while maintaining a distinctiveness rooted in the “Lost

Cause.”

Scholarship on the Lost Cause and Civil War reunions has tended to cast these

celebrations of the past as an “antimodern” reaction to the New South plan of modernization. In

this view the Lost Cause was an antimodern tonic to the dislocations of late nineteenth century

capitalism, or as one historian has put it: “a strong bulwark against modernity.” This, however,

creates a false dialectic between New South exponents and a backwards-looking Lost Cause

mythology.2 On closer examination, nostalgia for a golden age was hardly unique to the southern

experience of modernity. Nostalgia is a disease of the modern condition. From the survivors of

the French Revolution to the cultural architects of the German nation-state, in the nineteenth

century nostalgia played a key role in the “invention of tradition” and creation of “imagined

2 In a recent essay Karen Cox has argued that the Lost Cause was an “antimodern” cultural articulation. William Blair in his recent book challenges historians to move beyond the conception of the Lost Cause as the product of “backward-looking sentimentalists.” Cox, “Confederate Defeat and Cultural Expressions of Memory, 1877-1940” in Defeat and Memory: Cultural Histories of Military Defeat in the Modern Era, Jenny Macleod, ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 176; Blair, Cities of the Dead: Contesting the Memory of the Civil War in the South, 1865-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3.

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communities.”3 Nostalgia, then, is not a response to modernity—as though it exists outside the

modern—but is an essential component of the modern self.4 Consequently, southerners’

celebration of the Old South and the Lost Cause were not so much reflections of their

antimodernism but rather their embrace of modernity. As historian Gaines Foster has put it: “The

Lost Cause did not signal the South’s retreat from the future [rather] it eased the region’s passage

through a particularly difficult period of social change. Many of the values it championed helped

people adjust to a new order, to that extent, it supported the emergence of the New South.”5

The myth of the Lost Cause celebrated the past, provided a balm to New South

3 Eric Hobsbawm and Terrance Ranger, eds. The Invention of Tradition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006).

4 The term nostalgia was first coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer of Mulhouse, Switzerland to describe the way in which “exiles languished and wasted away far from their native land.” By the nineteenth century the term had lost much of its medical sense and described the peculiar feelings of loss that accompanied modernity and industrialization. See Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” trans. William S. Kemp, Diogenes 15:54 (June 1966): 81-103; and David Anderson, “Down Memory Lane: Nostalgia for the Old South in Post-Civil War Plantation Reminiscences” The Journal of Southern History 71:1 (February 2005): 105-136. For more on nostalgia and the modern condition see Jeffery K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105-140; Peter Fritzsche, “Specters of History: On Nostalgia, Exile, and Modernity” The American Historical Review 106:5 (December 2001): 1587-1618; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed. Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 209-211, 266; Alon Confino, The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 122.

5 Gaines M. Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy: Defeat, the Lost Cause, and the Emergence of the New South, 1865 to 1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 6. Here it is useful to point to Alon Confino quoting Marshall Berman: “To be modern is to be ‘both revolutionary and conservative….We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern…it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world’s potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities.” Confino, Nation As a Local Metaphor, 122; Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).

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industrialization, and gave a moral template for the future that was embraced by the entire

nation. In the words of Mrs. Plane, President of the Atlanta chapter of the Daughters of the

Confederacy, “the immortal past…gleams upon us with the rainbow promise of prosperity in the

future.”6 By emphasizing the manliness of the combatants, Civil War memory at the South’s

expositions prepared Americans for the supposed glory and honor that comes from war. Looking

at the anthropological exhibits of “primitive” peoples, white fairgoers were sure to view the

military prowess of the past and present as proof of their evolutionary progress and superiority.

In doing so, the nation furthered the process of reconciliation, while embracing a southern view

of racial order that ultimately cut African Americans out of full U.S. citizenship.7

Like other dislocating events, the Civil War provoked a contestation over its memory.

Defeated Confederates, victorious northerners, and recently freed slaves attempted to make sense

of the war, while trying to understand the political, social, and economic ramifications wrought

by four years of fighting. During the initial decade after Appomattox, most white southerners,

while tentatively accepting defeat, were unwilling to accept that their cause had been wrong.

These southerners deemphasized the role slavery played in precipitating the war. Instead they

argued that the South fought a “lost cause” over the foundational ideals of the United States.

Centered on a group Virginians who were reluctant secessionists with mostly undistinguished

war records, this interpretation found its best expression in the group’s Southern Historical

Society (SHS). In the pages of its Southern Review and in meetings of the SHS an interpretation

6 “Daughters of the Confederacy Day, Nov. 9” Confederate Veteran III:12 (December 1895), Confederate Veteran Index: Volume III (Nashville 1895): 377.

7 Blight, “A Quarrel Forgotten or a Revolution Remembered?: Reunion and Race in the Memory of the Civil War, 1875-1913” in Blight, Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 145.

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of the war emerged that celebrated Confederate leaders and generals as heroic men who had

fought over constitutional principals. The SHS, while open to arguing over the causes of the war,

was the first to erase the role of racial slavery in precipitating the war. In doing so, they laid the

groundwork for a future reconciliation between whites that ignored the contributions of blacks to

the war effort and minimized the effects of emancipation on postwar society.8

Beyond the activities of the SHS, Confederate memorials sprang up across the South in

the first decade after the war. These memorials were far from the triumphant commemorations of

the late nineteenth century. They were placed in graveyards and were meant to honor the dead

and vindicate their cause, while placing a “distance between the Confederacy and the daily lives

of southerners.” The commemorations contributed to a religious-quality in Civil War memory.

The Lost Cause became a civil religion for many southerners by combining ritual, mythology,

and theology with institutional, educational, and intellectual elements. Like all religious

manifestations, it had both organizational and interpretational power in the lives of its followers.

Confronted with defeat and the challenges of Reconstruction, white southerners turned to the

mythology of the Lost Cause to assert a regional identity and make sense of the changing world

around them.9

As memory of the war faded and as a new generation of southerners gained prominence,

the mythology of the Lost Cause shifted with the contours of the day. Beginning in the 1880s,

industrialization, the emergence of town-culture, and integration into a national economy

8 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 24, 49-62. Beyond the SHS this interpretation of slavery and the coming of the Civil War was lent scholarly legitimacy by James Ford Rhodes in his multivolume history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule in the South in 1877, 7 vols. (New York, 1893-1906).

9 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 37; Charles Reagan Wilson, Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865-1920 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 1, 13, 15.

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transformed traditional elements of southern life. Faced with the anxieties and dislocations of

industrial-capitalism white southerners, like all people confronted with modernity, looked for

sites of stability and social order. The Lost Cause reworked for the demands of the last decades

of the century became a source of solidity and calm for white southerners.10

The celebration of the Lost Cause that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s was less about the

heritage of defeat and mourning of the dead than it was a celebration of the Confederacy. By the

turn-of-the-century the Lost Cause became the story of “a glorious, organic civilization

destroyed by an avaricious ‘industrial society’ determined to wipe out its cultural foes.”11

Formed in 1889, the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) became the central organization of this

new celebration of the southern past and invented tradition. The UCV was primarily responsible

for the creation and maintenance of an acceptable history of the war for southerners. Like

previous memorial groups they emphasized the legality of secession, argued that the South was

defeated not by military prowess but by overwhelming numbers, and maintained the heroic

stature of Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. The UCV also placed a new emphasis on Lee’s

postwar career, welcomed Jefferson Davis to the Confederate pantheon, and put more emphasis

on the soldiers and women of the Confederacy. By including the rank-and-file along with

women, the UCV reflected the social anxieties of the late nineteenth century. Celebrating the

Confederate soldier along with the women of the home front, the Lost Cause incorporated the

10 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 87-90. David Blight succinctly captures the difference between the two periods of Civil War memory. The first period was characterized by an “inner” memory. Men who had fought in the war immediately sought to reinterpret their role. The inner memory of the Civil War remained well organized until at least the First World War. The second period beginning in the 1880s was characterized by a “national” memory. It avoided a “defensive tone and self-pity”; it was more about a mythic Old South in which the South was an exotic, premodern, preindustrial “model of grace.” Blight, “‘For Something Beyond the Battlefield’: Frederick Douglass and the Struggle for the Memory of the Civil War” in Beyond the Battlefield, 102-103.

11 Blight, Race and Reunion, 257.

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two groups likely to participate in radical politics into a conservative social order. “The

Confederate celebration served two interrelated social functions,” writes Gaines Foster. “It

helped fade the scars of defeat while providing a ritual model of an ordered, deferential,

conservative society. The Confederate tradition thereby helped the southern social order weather

a period of social stress with a minimum of disruption and, more important, only a modicum of

change.”12

Although the Lost Cause grew out of the intransigence of defeated southerners, it became

a broader mythology that allowed for the reconciliation of North and South. Historian David

Blight has argued that three visions of the Civil War emerged after the conflict. The

“reconciliationist vision” took root in the process of dealing with the dead and sought to reunite

the sections over the “bloody chasm” of war. The “white supremacist vision” also came to

prominence in the years following the conflict. This vision refused to allow space for those the

war had emancipated. Using terror and violence the white supremacist vision united with the

reconciliationist vision to form a powerful memory-bloc in the South. Lastly, Blight argues for a

third vision of the war: the “emancipationist vision.” This vision, rooted in black remembrance

of the Civil War, included white allies in both the North and South. Emancipationist memory

viewed the war as a “reinvention of the republic and the liberation of blacks to citizenship and

Constitutional equality.” In the turbulent decades leading to the twentieth century the

emancipationist vision was discarded to facilitate a reunion of white Americans. As Blight

succinctly puts it: “race was so deeply at the root of the war’s causes and consequences, and so

12 Foster, Ghosts of the Confederacy, 116-122, 144. For the way in which the Lost Cause had a political function, most notably a tool of southern elites to “fend off challenges to the rule of former Confederates” see Blair, Cities of the Dead, 3. This was also the period in which slavery and race were written out of the memory of the war. For Union veterans the war became about preserving the nation, for Confederate veterans it was about standing up for America’s founding ideals. Blight, Race and Reunion, 189.

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powerful a source of division in American social psychology, that it served as the antithesis of a

culture of reconciliation.” Sentimentality for an organic civilization rooted in racial slavery

combined with late nineteenth century racial science to create a nostalgia that reinvigorated

white supremacy and provided the mythic basis of Jim Crow modernity.13

This nostalgia, however, was not prominent in southerners alone. At the turn-of-the-

century, the celebration of the Lost Cause and a romantic image of the Old South combined with

reunions of veterans of both sides to reunite the nation. Reconciliation between North and South

occurred almost immediately at war’s end. Even after Congress wrestled control away from

President Johnson’s lenient policy toward Confederates and began Radical Reconstruction,

Americans found opportunities to reunite. In the decade after the war the United States lurched

between two paths. One path led to a “rapid reunion, lenient reconstruction, and resistance to

revolutions in race relations.” The other proposed a regeneration of the nation in which the South

would be “remade in the North’s image and harshly punished, the freedpeople enfranchised as

citizens, and the Constitution rewritten.” Political Reconstruction was essentially a series of

compromises between these two paths. Ultimately, however, the financial panic of 1873,

President Grant’s mismanagement of Reconstruction, southern white intransigence, the contested

presidential election of 1876, and Americans’ belief that political rights not economic ones were

the solution to social problems allowed the South to solidify its power and re-enter the Union as

an equal partner in 1877. In that year a confrontation-weary America washed its hands of the

South and its now entrenched racial problems. Over the following decades, white southerners

used a variety of legal and extra-legal measures to remove the civil and political rights of African

13 Blight, Race and Reunion, 2, 4, 274. See also Buck, The Road to Reunion, 1865-1900 (New York: Vintage Books, 1937), 70.

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Americans. In the words of David Blight, African Americans became the “sacrificial offerings

on the altar of reunion.”14

With Reconstruction officially over the nation merged economically and culturally. The

Lost Cause and the mythology of the Old South migrated north to become a foundational cultural

myth of American society. In the 1880s and 1890s minstrel shows, sentimental literature, and

romantic images flooded the nation. The machine age and the realities of industrial labor, notes

Blight, “produced a huge audience for a literature of escape into a pre-Civil War, exotic South,

that, all but ‘lost,’ was now the object of enormous nostalgia.”15 Minstrel shows played on

northern fears of southern black migration to the urban North, presenting African Americans as

locked in a rural and southern context in which their comic ineptitude prevented them from

challenging the paternalistic goodwill of their white masters.16 Sentimental literature and dialect

stories, such as the Uncle Remus novellas of Joel Chandler Harris, played into the escapism of

dime novels that mythologized the West or exotic lands.17 In these romantic stories, northerners

14 David Blight, Race and Reunion, 32, 102-138, 139. On the many avenues, failed and realized, during Reconstruction see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955); Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979); Michael Wayne, The Reshaping of Plantation Society: The Natchez District, 1860-1880 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988); and Ira Berlin, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

15 Blight, Race and Reunion, 211.

16 Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993): 133-135. See also Karen Sotiropoulos, Staging Race: Black Performers in Turn of the Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006). For the way in which minstrel shows helped create a white national identity see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) and David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).

17 On dime novels and escapism see Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso Press, 1987).

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saw a golden age that addressed their anxieties over the present, particularly gendered ones. The

Old South became home to strong patriarchal males who ruled their plantations with an effective

and strong hand, while southern women became the definition of proper gender etiquette. As

historian Nina Silber has noted, northerners’ “image of the South conformed to their image of the

idealized feminine sphere; in northern eyes, the South became a region of refined domestic

comfort, and the union of North and South restored the sense of domestic harmony that northern

society no longer possessed.”18 Lastly, the image of the Old South and the Lost Cause,

summarized in the term “Dixie,” became a powerful marketing tool. Dixie branded products

flooded the consumer marketplace to such a degree that American society became “invested

literally as well as figuratively in the Lost Cause.”19 By the start of the Cotton States and

International Exposition northerners and southerners had developed a common image of the

South’s recent past. Public entertainment and the culture industry contributed to the expansion of

the Lost Cause and Old South mythology as not a southern cultural form but an American one.

The most salient way North and South came together at the turn-of-the-century, however,

was through Civil War reunions. Although in the initial decades following the war there was

resistance to allowing Confederate veterans too much leeway in public demonstrations, by the

late 1880s not only were Confederate veterans staging reunions but were doing so with former

Union soldiers. Recovering from the horrors of war, veterans of both sides felt little desire to

come together and celebrate it. However, as memories faded and as the Lost Cause took an

increasingly celebratory tone, veterans took on a more prominent role in Civil War memory.

Membership in the largest Union veteran association, the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR),

exploded from sixty thousand members in 1880 to four hundred thousand members in 1890.

18 Silber, Romance of Reunion, 9-10.

19 Cox, “Confederate Defeat,” 177-178.

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Likewise, former Confederates coalesced around the United Confederate Veterans. While each

organization held separate reunions, they increasingly celebrated together. At these joint

reunions a paradoxical language emerged in which the Confederacy and the Union fought for

equally righteous goals: the Union, to preserve the nation, the Confederacy, to preserve

America’s founding ideals.20

The fraternalism of the former soldiers crystallized around a language of “manliness,

valor, sacrifice, and a mutual sense of honor.”21 This language assuaged the fears of a society

undergoing a crisis of masculinity. Kristin Hoganson, in her work on the ways in which gender

helped provoke the Spanish-American war, has concluded that the late-nineteenth century’s

“psychic crisis was, in many respects, a crisis of manhood.”22 The Civil War veteran came to

symbolize the manly ideal of the 1890s. Even more so for the Confederate veteran, whose lack of

a federal pension made him seem more independent than Union soldiers. Beyond the stoicism of

Confederate veterans, all white southern men were viewed as especially virile in their defense of

the region’s racial hierarchy and their protection of white womanhood. Even though most

northerners condemned lynching, they saw in the actions of white southerners a passion to

protect the “weaker sex.” Fearful of a southern black contagion, northerners looked to the

Confederate veteran and his sons as the answer to the late-nineteenth century’s “Negro

question.”23

20 Blight, Race and Reunion, 171.

21 Blight, Race and Reunion, 199.

22 Kristin Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 12. On the “masculinity crisis” of the 1890s see also Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 11.

23 Silber, Romance of Reunion, 165-176.

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The Lost Cause in the 1880s and 1890s served as a salve for the New South plan of

modernization and industrialization. It was not, however, an antimodern cultural articulation.

Modernity’s success is dependent on its ability to incorporate its negation. The memory of the

Civil War and Old South were given meaning because they were a part of the present as much as

the past. “No enduring social memory can be entirely static,” writes historian W. Fitzhugh

Brundage. “Each time a tradition is articulated, it must be given a meaning appropriate to the

historical context in which it is invoked. For a historical memory to retain its capacity to speak to

and mobilize its intended audience, it must address contemporary concerns about the past.”24

When northerners and southerners came together at the South’s international expositions they

constructed a memory of the past that was well suited to their present.

At the Atlanta and Nashville expositions the modern subject was formulated through

ruptures of the past in the present. Through their architecture, exhibits, and displays the

expositions formed an “adamantine” link with the past creating a teleological History that began

in the ancient world and culminated in the perfectibility of a near southern future.25 Central to

this history was the memory of the Civil War. The expositions reflected the changes in Civil War

memory by erasing the emancipatory vision of the war in favor of reconciliation between whites.

24 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Introduction: No Deed but Memory,” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 10.

25 Reporting from the Tennessee Centennial the New Haven Register noted: “The Tennessee Centennial Exposition is an adamantine link between the past and the present, and everything connected with it appears to carry out the idea. There are many elements presented at Nashville that were wanting at Chicago. The great Columbian Fair certainly marked the progress of the world, but the starting point was not visible and there was nothing to indicate either time or distance. At Nashville everything is marked so plainly that the story becomes indelibly impressed upon the mind.” “The Tennessee Centennial. Great Exposition Formally Opened at Nashville.” New Haven Register, May 1, 1897, p. 8.

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Northerners and southerners reunited in the belief that the war had been a manly contestation

between two equally right sides. The Atlanta and Nashville fairs were essential components of

this new imagined community. Meant to attract both northern capital and northerners to the

South, the expositions were modern spaces intimately connected with the past. The expositions

were reunion rituals writ large.

Like the Classical and Romanesque architectural motifs of the fairs, the Civil War linked

the South to a mythical ancient past. In a celebration of Confederate women, Mrs. Goodlett,

President of the State Division of the Daughters of the Confederacy in Tennessee, connected the

“Southern mother” with “the Roman matron” who “girded [her son’s] sword on the stripling boy

and sent him forth to battle for Freedom’s sake.” Comparing southern chivalry and fortitude in

battle with the Greek soldiers of Thermopylae, Goodlett maintained a Greco-Roman analogy of

southern history.26 Connections to a mythical white past were essential to southerners’ claims of

a linear path to a southern Jim Crow future.

However, it was the recent and much more real history of the region that shone most

brightly at the expositions. For northern and southern writers who visited the fairs the Civil War

was never far from their minds. “The city of the siege is a thing of the past, but its heroic

memories will endure forever,” wrote Wallace Putnam Reed of Atlanta. “In its place stands the

metropolis of the New South, and side by side the blue and gray are working out their destiny,

with simple faith and loyal hearts.”27 Walter Cooper, the Cotton States exposition’s official

chronicler, suggested that the fair’s scenes “of the peaceful triumph of industry” and “pageant of

26 “Daughters at the Capitol” Nashville Banner, June 22, 1897, p. 8.

27 Wallace Putnam Reed, “Atlanta’s Baptism of Fire” in Thought Blossoms from the South: A Collection of Poems, Essays, Etc. by Southern Writers with an Introduction by Hon. John Temple Graces. A Souvenir of the Cotton States and International Exposition. Louise Threete Hodges and Gertrude Eloise Bealer, eds. (Atlanta, 1895), 15.

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peace” were given more significance when compared to the “awful panorama of war.”28 For

many northern observers the destruction and “injustices” inflicted upon the South were necessary

object lessons to prove how far the South had progressed since the war. It was the South’s

material and moral progress as evidenced by the expositions that helped make reunion possible

in the late nineteenth century. The New York delegation to the Atlanta fair went so far as to ask:

“If such an exposition could have been possible in 1860, our terrible Civil War might have been

avoided—who knows?”29

In the expositions’ celebration of industry and commerce, northerners and southerners

came together. In a speech on “Connecticut Day” at the Cotton States the Governor of

Connecticut noted that “[t]o-day we are witnesses of an unusual spectacle. Georgia and

Connecticut, New England and the New South, are here in harmonious and cordial relations,

working unitedly [sic] and enthusiastically in and for an industrial enterprise, which, for business

importance and patriotic significance, rivals any enterprise of a similar character ever undertaken

in our country.”30 Impressed by the industry and modernity of the expositions many northerners

were confident that the “springing up of factories of innumerable varieties, and an addition and a

28 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 93.

29 The delegation further reflected: “It was the increasing purposes of the ages, the healing balm of old wounds, the final solution to social, sectional and racial problems, if the sentiments uttered are honestly and practically developed and carried out. It was the substantial proof of Grady’s stirring sentiments—the working out of a great idea that had come to pervade the hearts and minds of the conservative men of all sections.” New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, GA (Albany, 1896), 149; Margaret Severance, Official Guide to Atlanta including Information of the Cotton States and International Exposition (Atlanta, 1895), 69; L.W.B., “Atlanta’s Magic City” Chicago Inter Ocean, September 29, 1895, p. 24; “Atlanta Since the War” Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1895, p. 2; Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 93; Nathaniel Stephenson, The Tennessee Centennial Exposition, First Published in the Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, April 9, 1897 (Nashville, 1897), 19-22.

30 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 116-117.

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general stimulus to industrial energies by northern capital, brain and brawn” would “naturally”

cause the “sectional and other feeling, engendered by a Civil War, [to] give way.”31 Mayor Swift

of Chicago even suggested that industrial expositions might have been able to steer America

away from Civil War. “Ignorance is often if not usually the parent of misunderstanding and of

strife,” spoke Swift. “[I]f the people of the Northern and Southern sections of our common

country had interchanged visits and mingled together before 1861 as much as they have latterly

done, they could never have taken up arms against each other.” For New South boosters and

northern capitalists the reunited future would be based on economic and industrial integration.32

With the expositions’ celebration of commerce, New South ideologues aligned the region

with northern values and predicted that the South would emerge as a powerful player in the

expansion of American overseas markets. Many observers exchanged the tensions of the Civil

War for a new form of international industrial and commercial competition. George Brown,

Solicitor-General of the Blue Ridge Circuit, gave a speech on behalf of Georgia at the Cotton

States in which he celebrated “the Spartan courage of the Southern soldier, as half-clad and half-

fed he marched without a murmur into the very jaws of death.” Such soldierly stoicism, Brown

suggested, was now the “sacred and priceless inheritance” of all Americans and would gird the

United States as it “engaged with all the nations of the earth in the friendly rivalry of peaceful

pursuits.”33 In their festivals of progress, New South expositions attached themselves to a linear

31 New York at the Cotton States, 150.

32 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 124; “The Bay State at Nashville Tennessee’s Centennial Show” Springfield Republican, October 1, 1897, p. 6; Hand Book to the Cotton States and International Exposition: Being a Faithful Account of What a Representative of the Brooklyn Eagle Saw When He Visited the Fair (Atlanta, 1895), 5. Microfilm Reel 126, No. 3. Smithsonian National Museum of American History Library, Washington, D.C.

33 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 99.

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narrative of material progress. This history did not erase the past but enclosed it within the

present and mobilized it for future generations. The southern past would come to guide the entire

country as it embarked on economic and foreign expansion. The space of the expositions became

sites of reconciliation that were modern and southern, modern in their view of the future and

southern in their implementation.

There were many other signs of sectional unity at the expositions. The arrival of the

Liberty Bell elicited a strong outpouring of national patriotism by southerners at both

expositions. In Atlanta a large parade met the bell and followed it through the streets of the city

to the exposition where it was placed in the Pennsylvania Building and guarded by four

Philadelphia policemen. “It had drawn the first great crowd of the Expositions,” recalled the

official history, “but, what was of much more importance and of far higher significance, it had

called forth expressions which did much to unify and perpetuate the sentiments of fraternity and

patriotism in remote and once antagonistic sections of the country.” The Liberty Bell, a symbol

of national patriotism yet rooted in the mythology and history of a northern city, was the focus of

reunion rituals performed at both expositions. A New York dignitary at the Atlanta exposition

for “New York Day” commented: “Georgia and New York belong to the aristocracy of America.

They were numbered among the original Thirteen.” The Atlanta and Nashville fairs stressed their

state’s pivotal roles in the making of the nation, while northern visitors from the original colonies

glorified their shared revolutionary history.34

While the South’s presentation of industrial-modernity pleased most observers, others

were disappointed that the expositions did not confirm the stereotypes of southern life common

in Plantation Romances and dialect stories. Maude Andrews warned the readers of Leslie’s

34 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 116, 131; “Liberty Bell Will Go” Baltimore Sun, August 7, 1897, p. 7.

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Weekly that they may be disappointed if they came south for the expositions. “There are

Southern types,” reported Andrews, “and the negro, of course, is here, but the old South of

romance and inertia is dead.” Although disheartened, Andrews conceded that southerners, while

still “distinctive,” were now “full-fledged” Americans, which was “a great thing for the South

and for Atlanta.” A month later in Harper’s Weekly, Andrews expressed a similar sentiment:

“Atlanta bears no resemblance to the ante bellum South: it is far ahead of the quaintness of those

times, and the poverty which came afterward. It has no residences which suggest the nooks and

corners described in the dialect stories.”35 Others worried that New South industry corrupted the

purity of southerners. F. Hopkinson Smith, acknowledging the irrevocable march of progress,

lamented in the pages of Scribner’s Magazine that the New South was destroying “the most

restful, the most wholesome, the most simple [life]—found nowhere now but in our small

Southern cities—a life which once extinguished will never be revived.”36 The fairs organizers

were also willing to trade in southern stereotypes to attract visitors. Director-General of the

Tennessee Centennial, Major Lewis, in a promotional interview with a northern newspaper was

both comic and stereotyped, noting that “We did act a little bad along about ‘61” but now the

reason for the exposition was “Patriotism; pure patriotism.” At the same time, Lewis contended

that Centennial was to be “a typical Southern exposition with cotton and corn, blue grass and

wild flowers, the mule and the ‘nigger’ on their native heath.”37 Despite Lewis’ assurances,

northerners looking for an escape to the Old South tended to be disappointed by the South’s

35 Maude Andrews, “The Atlanta Exposition” Leslie’s Weekly Illustrated (September 26, 1895): 199. Andrews, “The Social Side of the Atlanta Exposition” Harper’s Weekly: A Journal of Civilization (October 5, 1895): 948.

36 F. Hopkinson Smith, “Some Notes on Tennessee’s Centennial” Scribner’s Magazine (September 1897): 344.

37 Edward Freiberger, “Tennessee Centennial Exposition in Nashville,” Chicago Inter Ocean, October 11, 1896, p. 21-22.

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apparent modernity. However, it was the peculiar nature of the South’s Jim Crow modernity, as

indicated by Lewis, which made clear the ways in which the old continued to reside in the new.

Despite the rhetoric of sectional harmony there was one topic that still could lead to

tension between the regions. Although praising the “magnanimous spirit” of the North at the

Centennial, the Nashville Banner spoke out against those northerners “whose imaginary love for

the negro has endangered such detestation and malignity toward his former master, that they

would gladly see a holocaust of the South.”38 If North and South were to be reunited it would be

on the South’s terms of a Jim Crow modernity.

At the Atlanta exposition the Democratic Governor of Georgia, William Atkinson,

declared that nothing was “more instructive than in the marvelous progress shown in every line

by this emancipated people in their own building.”39 The exposition’s official history suggested

that the Negro Building demonstrated the ways African Americans had achieved material and

moral progress, while crediting southern whites for their success.40 White commentary on the

Tennessee Centennial’s Negro Building struck a similar balance between black progress and

white paternalism. “The white race of the South has generously and wisely aided the Negro race

to solve the problem of self-help,” proclaimed a pamphlet for the Centennial, “and it is pleasant

to note that many Negro leaders have met the advances of their former masters in a gratifying

spirit of thankfulness and have utilized the advantages afforded them with surprising

38 “Glorious Fourth at the Centennial,” Nashville Banner, July 3, 1897, p. 1.

39 Hon. W.Y. Atkinson, “The Atlanta Exposition,” The North American Review (October 1895): 392.

40 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 57.

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intelligence.”41 As noted in Chapter Two, the fairs’ organizers viewed the Negro Exhibits as

illustrative of a developing Jim Crow modernity through which African Americans became a

modern and progressive people, while remaining indebted to a southern white paternalism. In

this way, blacks would progress on white terms becoming modern but remaining locked in the

region’s racial hierarchy.

At the expositions, northerners flocked to the Negro Building making it, along with the

Woman’s Building, the most popular official space of the fairs. “It is the feature of the fair that

seems to struck them [northerners] more than any other,” reported the Atlanta Constitution.

“[A]ll have been impressed with the direct friendship exhibited between the two races.”42 John

Farrell, President of the New York Editorial Association, congratulated Atlanta for permitting

African Americans to “erect a building for the exclusive exhibits of the products of negro labor

and skill, thus enabling your colored people to show what advances they have made in the arts of

civilization.” Farrell was sure that the exposition’s success “will add another link to the chain of

friendship between the two sections.”43 On Illinois Day, Chicagoans were willing to look past the

social ills of the South, particularly lynching, in favor of reunion: “She is not yet perfect; wrongs

both great and small are still committed upon her soil, wrongs done in violation of law and

wrongs done in the name of law.”44 Although blacks may have “lagged” behind, the fact that

they were progressing materially and morally was solid evidence of the South’s progress as a

whole and reason enough for northerners to re-embrace the region. By bringing northerners to

41 The Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition (Nashville, 1897): 20. Microfilm Reel 128, No. 6. SNMAH.

42 “Comrades Now” Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1895, p.13.

43 “New York to New York” Atlanta Constitution, October 26, 1895, p. 5.

44 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 123.

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the South to witness the “peaceful” relations between the races, the Atlanta and Nashville

expositions were essential spaces in which a Jim Crow modernity was acted out and exported to

the rest of the nation as an act of reconciliation.45

The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial created a teleology that stretched from

ancient Greece and Rome through the antebellum period, Civil War, and Reconstruction before

arriving at the New South. However, despite New South ideologues’ attempts to place the South

on the vanguard of progress and Time, the reality of modern southern life meant a constant

reoccurrence of the past in the present. Literary critic Dana Seitler notes that the “disorienting

experience of modern time—gave rise to a paradox: modernity sought a break with the past, but

that break necessitated the past’s return.” Walter Benjamin insisted in his analysis of modernity

that rather than time unfolding along a teleological line, modernity created a “montage of

disparate times, an imbrication of shifting and contestatory temporalities.” Following Benjamin,

Seitler concludes that “the necessary recurrence of the past [is] at the root of modern identity.”

Modern identity, then, was formulated through ruptures of the past in the present. The

Enlightenment project of a rational selfhood, divorced from the past, only existed in rhetoric.46

For New South boosters the past, while not erasable, was of little consequence in the

march of southern progress. Industrial modernity served to reunite the sections. Nevertheless,

history was an essential component of New South identity. The past could not be escaped.

Atlanta’s fairground was a sacred site of Civil War memory. Both Atlanta and Nashville

undergirded their modernity with the maintenance of a Greco-Roman analogy of the southern

past and present. The Negro Building maintained an emancipationist vision of the Civil War,

45 Nina Silber argues that in the 1890s the South’s “backwardness” came to be the vanguard of race control. Silber, Romance of Reunion, 141.

46 Dana Seitler, Atavistic Tendencies: The Culture of Science in American Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 1, 206.

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while at the same time confirming for white southerners a racial hierarchy. The expositions

mobilized the past for future generations. This was made most clear in the meetings of Union

and Confederate soldiers at the Atlanta and Nashville fairs. Faced with a masculinity that was

viewed as regressive and effeminate, late nineteenth century Americans looked to the past for a

strong articulation of manhood. In doing so, the Civil War soldier became an exemplar of

modern manliness and prepared the way for American imperial forays overseas.

The goal of the expositions was to demonstrate the progress made by the South since the

Civil War, to “bring the two sections of the union into greater harmony,” to attract northern

investment and immigration, and to connect the region to the bourgeoning economies of Latin

America.47 Sectional harmony, however, could be achieved only if the antagonisms of the Civil

War were laid to rest and the combatants of both sides celebrated for their manly virtue. Civil

War reunions at the expositions became central parts of the South’s push for national

reconciliation.

Both the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions were important sites of

reunion in the 1890s. The Atlanta fair tied its “Blue-Gray Day” to the reunion of soldiers for the

national commemoration of the battlefield of Chickamauga, while Nashville played host to the

decade’s largest gathering of veterans when it hosted the United Confederate Veterans’ Annual

Meeting. In each instance the rhetoric of manliness was connected not only to the past but to the

future. In the imperial milieu of the exposition spaces, the manliness of Civil War veteran was

celebrated. As America looked beyond its borders and as New South boosters situated the region

as an important node for American expansion in Latin America and the Caribbean, the manly

47 Charles W. Kindrick, “General Remarks About the Fair” New Orleans Times Picayune, November 22, 1895, p. 6.

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Civil War soldier became a significant symbol of the growing militaristic spirit of the late

1890s.48

The celebration of a war that tore the nation apart was not an antithetical enterprise to the

expositions’ goals of commercial and industrial reunion. Always concerned with the bottom-line,

expositions viewed Civil War reunions as important events necessary to attract visitors. By the

late 1880s reunion was big business, drawing huge crowds and their disposable income. Towns

and cities vied to attract a meeting of the UCV or GAR. Sectional reconciliation, while

coalescing around the ideas of “manliness, valor, sacrifice, and a mutual sense of honor,” was

also good for business and investment and, as David Blight argues, was “staged in part as a

means of cementing commercial ties between Northern money and Southern economic

development.”49 With this in mind, the Nashville and Atlanta expositions welcomed to their

cities veterans and supporters of both sides of the war.

In the late nineteenth century manliness and civilization were intimately linked.

Modernity was understood in terms of the body, particularly the way in which the white male

body symbolized the epitome of racial development.50 Southern expositions connected to this

bodily turn by offering a “blueprint of progress” to their visitors.51 The fairs’ display of

48 Silber, Romance of Reunion, 171-172. For the way in which southern concern over manliness and the destruction of the family were articulated in extremist political groups such as the Ku Klux Klan see Nancy MacLean, Behind the Mask of Chivalry: The Making of the Second Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xii.

49 Blight, Race and Reunion, 199, 172.

50 Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; John Kasson, Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001); and Daniel Bender, American Abyss: Savagery and Civilization in the Age of Industry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009).

51 Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984).

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“primitive” peoples alongside evidence of American manufacturing, commercial, and moral

superiority created a cultural narrative in which white male, and to some extent female, fairgoers

viewed themselves as the embodiment of progress. The displays of soldierly manliness

personified by the Civil War soldier became an essential component to a argument over the

evolutionary superiority of white males and their moral right to extend “civilization” across the

globe. Looking at anthropological exhibits, white fairgoers were sure to view the military

prowess of the past and present as proof of their evolutionary progress and superiority. In doing

so, the nation furthered the process of reconciliation, while embracing a southern view of racial

order.

Following the establishment of Chickamauga as a National Park on September 21, 1895

between twenty thousand and forty thousand Civil War veterans made their way south from

Tennessee to Atlanta for the exposition’s Blue-Gray Day.52 Enthusiasm was so great that the two

railroads operating between Chattanooga and Atlanta sent thirty additional trains to carry the

crowds to the exposition.53 The day featured a march through Atlanta of both Confederate and

Union veterans followed by speeches in the exposition’s auditorium and general socializing

between the veteran soldiers. The New York commission recalled that the Union and

Confederate veterans “fraternized like long-parted friends and discussed the stirring scenes of

thirty years ago with many jests at the discomfitures each had experienced at the hands of the

other, and with pitying and sorrowful recollections of the comrades who fell on the field of battle

or died in the hospitals, the ill-fated victims of disease, exposure and privation.”54 The local

chapter of the United Confederate Veterans each wore a white badge with the words

52 “Under One Flag” Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1895, p. 1.

53 E.W.B. “On To Atlanta” Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1895, p. 1.

54 New York at the Cotton States, 259.

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“Confederate Veteran” in order for visitors and veterans to identify them and ask questions about

the exposition and city. In the end, there were veteran representatives from every state in the

country and they took pleasure in meeting with each other and identifying products form their

state or visiting their state’s building. “Today’s meeting,” concluded the Constitution, “will be of

infinite good in bring together in close bonds of friendship the men who fought against each

other a few years ago.”55

The speeches given at the exposition’s Auditorium considered the ways in which the two

sections came together at the fair. Governor of Ohio, William McKinley, preparing for a

Republican presidential run, reflected the now common interpretation of the war: “The bitterness

and resentment belong to the past, and its glories are the common heritage of us all. What was

won in that war belongs just as securely to those who lost as to those who triumphed.” The

official history of the exposition noted that there was a “general desire” by the veterans of

Sherman’s army “to return to the scene of its hard-fought battles of 1864…to meet the soldiers

who fought against them.” The day was filled with comradely and reconciliationist symbolism.

Union General John Schofield, Commander of the Army of the Ohio during the Atlanta

campaign shared the stage with prominent Confederate General James Longstreet, while Atlanta

Constitution editor, William Hemphill, pinned a Confederate veteran’s badge on General Lucius

Fairchild, ex-Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Army of the Republic.56 The Constitution was

confident that the reunion signified “the return of peaceful relations between the sections” and

that the “meeting will be of infinite good in bringing together in close bonds of friendship the

men who fought against each other a few years ago.”57 Reflecting on the reunion, the official

55 “Under One Flag” Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1895, p. 1.

56 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 111-113.

57 “Under One Flag” Atlanta Constitution, September 21, 1895, p. 1.

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history of New York’s participation at the exposition recalled: “It was a scene that caused every

liberty-loving and patriotic heart to throb faster, and recognize in such a reunion the cementing

of the ties that shall bind the people of the freest and greatest country the world has ever known

in fraternal fellowship and indissoluble unity.”58 On September 21, 1895, North and South,

Union and Confederate put aside old differences to celebrate a future of commercial and

economic development.

While some celebrated the coming together of the sections, others reflected on the way in

which the Civil War was responsible for creating new men. Union General William Jackson

Palmer at the commemoration of Chickamauga cast the war as a “sectional challenge to

American manhood.”59 Welcoming the veterans to Atlanta, Evan P. Howell, then editor of the

Constitution, celebrated the Civil War soldier as the embodiment of conservative virtue, while

castigating “the men who remained at home and sent substitutes into the war.”60 In the eyes of

some, the manliness of the Confederate soldier allowed for the reconciliation of the late

nineteenth century. Captain W. D. Ellis, speaking for the Confederate veterans, dismissed the

causes of the war, amounting the conflict to an “inevitable destiny.” The war did, however, make

clear that the Confederates “fought it out like brave men; we settled it forever, and with a

magnanimity equal to our courage we shook hands across the bloody chasm.”61 Southern

soldiers’ manliness allowed them to not only accept defeat but to extend their hand in friendship

to their former enemy. Taken together, the Cotton States exposition’s Blue-Gray Day became a

celebration of an American manhood forged during the Civil War and was now a necessary

58 New York at the Cotton States, 254, 259.

59 “Blue and Gray Day” Atlanta Constitution, September 20, 1895.

60 “Comrades Now” Atlanta Constitution, September 22, 1895, p. 13.

61 Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 113.

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component of a growing imperial sentiment undergirded by an evolutionary understanding of

nations and people.

In Nashville the United Confederate Veterans elicited a similar response. During the

UCV’s annual meeting Nashville’s population increased by fifty thousand of which twenty

thousand were thought to be Confederate veterans. Nashville’s citizens took great pride in

hosting the thousands of “old Confederates” who came to “celebrate their five years struggle for

the ‘Lost Cause’; to commemorate the death of their heroes in mighty battles; to talk of brothers

and comrades who fell in the fire of the enemy, and to pay tribute to Tennessee in her celebration

of her one hundredth anniversary as a State.”62 The UCV meeting, while technically separate

from the Tennessee Centennial, was intimately linked with the celebration just outside the city

limits. Although most of the events and speeches were held in the Gospel Tabernacle, future

home of the Grand Ole Opry and now Ryman Auditorium, almost all the speakers referenced the

fair.

On the second day of the reunion, the Centennial opened its gates to UCV members. On

June 24th the veterans gathered in Nashville to march through the city. Comprising of thirty-one

units, including all the state divisions of the UCV, executives, soldiers of high rank, and with the

Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans making up the last two units,

the parade wound its way through Nashville to the exposition’s Auditorium. The sponsors and

maids of honor of each state rode in open carriages at the head, with the rear brought up by the

Major General and staff carrying the state flag. The Daughters of the Confederacy also rode

along in open carriages. “Every division as it passed was received with cheers,” remembered

Herman Justi, “and when these companies came along which had the members dressed in the

genuine old uniforms of Confederate gray, many affecting scenes were witnessed. The tattered 62 “Modern Newspaper Enterprise” Confederate Veteran (May 1897), 237.

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flags waved over the shattered remnants of the once mighty host, and it was a gala day that will

scarcely ever fade from the memory of any participant in the great march, or of any who saw it

pass.” The weather, however, did not cooperate and a heavy rain fell throughout the parade.

Despite the weather, the soldiers and fairgoers were not disheartened and gathered in the

Auditorium for a final “jubilee.” Wearing their “old gray uniforms” they sat and listened to

“Dixie” and the “Bonnie Blue Flag,” intermittingly interrupting the speakers with cheering. At

night a display of fireworks was given with portraits in fire of prominent Confederates that were

met with the “old rebel yell” that “went up in all its pristine strength.” Lastly, the exposition

management wanting to show its support of Confederate memory gave one-third of the day’s

gate receipts to the Confederate Memorial Institute.63

The speeches during the reunion emphasized both the manliness of the soldiers and the

ways in which their valor and orderliness stood in contrast to the disorder of late nineteenth

century capitalism. “The order of the occasion was perfect,” the Confederate Veteran quoted a

Rev. Dr. Hoss as saying. “Drunkenness was very rare and the police had little work to do. It was

easy to see that these multitudes of gray-haired men represented the very flower of American

citizenship.” Likewise, Bishop Fitzgerald speaking for Nashville’s mayor made clear the Lost

Cause was alive and well at the exposition. “The fame of the Confederate soldier is safe,” spoke

Fitzgerald. “He has won his place, and he will keep it….nothing that was best and noblest was

lost. Honor was not lost: high ideals of manhood were not lost.”64 Judge John C. Ferriss,

representing Davidson County maintained the manliness and dignity of the Confederate soldier:

“We never sacrificed our manhood then, nor never will; we returned to our desolate homes

63 “The Reunion” Confederate Veteran (July 1897), 339; Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Nashville: 1898), 228-232.

64 “The Reunion” Confederate Veteran (July 1897), 340, 341. Almost every speaker at the reunion celebrated American manhood as represented by the Confederate veterans present.

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without a murmur and began life anew.”65 In celebrating the manhood forged through war thirty

years earlier, the men of the UCV challenged those who had not fought to demonstrate their

manliness.66 In the crisis of masculinity, where industrialization, commercial culture, and

suffrage threatened America’s faith in the republic of yeoman farmers, such challenges were

taken seriously by men born after the war and now mostly in charge of the region and nation.67

In the imperial milieu of the 1890s, the future was as much in focus as the past. “They

cheered two flags, the stars and stripes and the stars and bars,” noted the Official History,

“…they were ready now to fight under the stars and stripes with the same devotion and courage

they displayed when fighting under the stars and bars.”68 Indeed, some speakers at the UCV

reunion looked beyond the South for an opportunity to prove their loyalty. Judge Ferriss noted

that “after thirty-four years of peace, we stand together as one great nation, the blue and gray

working side by side for the good of our great country, and all of us as a man are in sympathy

with our little neighbor, Cuba, ‘the Gem of the Ocean.’”69 A year prior to the war with Spain,

reunions of veterans were important points in which American manliness and military might

were celebrated and propagandized. Throughout both fairs the United States military made

65 “Thousands Cheer the Sentiment, ‘Dixie!’” Nashville Banner, June 22, 1897, p. 1.

66 In General Gordon’s outgoing speech as President of the UCV he challenged his listeners “To cherish such memories and recall such a past, whether crowned with success or consecrated in defeat, is to idealize principle and strengthen character, intensify love of country and convert defeat and disaster into pillars of support for future manhood and noble womanhood.” “Gen. Jno. B. Gordon Re-Elected” Nashville Banner, June 23, 1897, p. 2.

67 As Steven Hahn has noted these threats were taken seriously and the response to them was often articulated in political action. Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

68 Justi, Official History, 232.

69 “Thousands Cheer the Sentiment, ‘Dixie!’” Nashville Banner, June 22, 1897, p. 1.

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impressive displays of both weaponry and soldiers accompanied by mock battles and military

encampments. Combined with the celebration of past glories the southern soldier became the

quintessential modern soldier.70

The economic depression of 1893 had a significant impact on the ways in which

Americans viewed the world at the end of the century. While modernity predicted endless

progress, the reality of the decade suggested that social and economic regression was as much a

possibility as progression. The masses of unemployed men made many question what it meant to

be manly and how masculine responsibility, tied to providing for one’s family, could be

articulated at a time when employment was scarce. At the same time, those men fortunate

enough to maintain their social and economic standing became concerned that they were losing

their manly vitality through their opulence. Lastly, the closing of the frontier meant, for many

observers, that real men could no longer be made through the West.71

In this psychological milieu, the Civil War soldier came to be seen as an embodiment of a

masculinity that was fading. “The epitome of honor and the model of manly character in the

post-Civil War period was the veteran,” writes Hoganson. “The respect accorded to veterans led

70 Silber, Romance of Reunion, 176, 169.

71 The closing of the frontier as a closing of American identity was made famous by Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” speech to the American Historical Association at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and had a wide influence on late nineteenth and early twentieth century conceptions of American identity. See also the extensive literature on Theodore Roosevelt and the manly ideal. Arnoldo Testi, “The Gender of Reform Politics: Theodore Roosevelt and the Culture of Masculinity” Journal of American History 81:4 (March 1995): 1509-1533; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000); Kathleen Dalton, Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002); Sarah Watts, Rough Rider in the White House: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of Desire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Harvey C. Mansfield, Manliness (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).

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some observers to conclude that the greatest legacy of the war had been manhood itself.”72 In the

expositions’ celebration of material superiority and imperial desire, the Civil War soldier became

the quintessential role model for the extension of American influence across the hemisphere. The

Confederate soldier more so than the Union one came to be associated with the future rather than

the past. Former soldiers abounded in the expositions’ executives, they embraced the New South

mantra and in doing so confirmed a popular conception that the Union veteran indulged in the

past, while the Confederate veteran staked his claim to the coming times. “Even if they

celebrated a man’s earlier accomplishments,” writes historian Nina Silber, “many Americans

objected to the image of the veteran who wallowed in the past and did not contribute toward the

future. In this context, many non-GAR men were drawn to a southern model of manhood, one

that was personified in Confederate soldiers and veterans and in many of the present leaders of

the southern states.” In the militaristic build-up to 1898, the manly soldiering of the Confederate

soldier became the patriotic all-American.73 In the expositions’ commemoration of the

Confederate veteran, the fairs connected to a growing narrative in which an imperial manliness

was rooted in the South. The reconciliation of the nation, then, was dependent on the ways in

which northern men were able to adopt a southern sense of manliness. The Cotton States and

Tennessee Centennial expositions provided northerners with the opportunity to witness first-hand

the object lesson of southern manhood.

Civil War and commercial reconciliation was largely the purview of men at the

expositions. Women, however, also took on a significant role in the maintenance of Confederate

memory by curating historical objects and Civil War relics. While the Civil War reunions were

72 Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood, 24.

73 Silber, Romance of Reunion, 171-172.

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discrete events, lasting only a day or two, both the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial

expositions maintained permanent exhibits of Civil War memory. Throughout the fairgrounds

visitors reflected on martial objects of the past. As collected memory, historical objects fixed

time as static, producing a sense of stability in a “period of rapid and unpredictable changes.”74

Combined with the narrative of the Lost Cause, southern historical objects and images, in their

erasure of regional differences, created in the minds of southerners’ an imagined community.

Significantly, this invented tradition was exported out of the South to the nation. The expositions

were one part of a matrix of Dixie themed products, advertising, and stories that were gobbled up

by turn-of-the-century Americans. Through the day’s popular culture the Lost Cause and the Old

South strengthened the bonds between North and South.75 Lost Cause and Civil War relics were

“representation[s] of the past embedded in the context of social action.” They indicated a process

by which Americans’ southernized the nation, “making it an everyday mental property and

creating a visual image of it in their minds.”76 Southern expositions were one of the main

catalysts for the transformation of American national memory.

At the Cotton States exposition the fairground itself was a site of Civil War memory.

Built on a former battlefield, Piedmont Park retained the scars of the great conflict and impressed

northerners who visited. “The war made it historic ground years ago,” reported the Chicago Inter

Ocean, “for here in the terraces overhanging the Plaza were the Confederate rifle pits for the

defense of the old Atlanta.” Memory of the fairground as battleground was an important object

lesson for southern progress and commercial modernity. The paper continued: “The darkness

74 Confino, Nation As a Local Metaphor, 156.

75 On the Dixie-fication of America see Cox, Dreaming of Dixie.

76 Confino, Nation As a Local Metaphor, 100. For Alon Confino the same was true in late nineteenth century Germany.

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hung over Atlanta for several years, but from the ashes of that old Confederate city has a sprung

a new city, that knows no sectionalism, but is distinctively American as Chicago.”77 Standing on

sacred ground fairgoers experienced the past, present, and future through the built-environment

of the expositions.

Other than the fairground itself, there were few other spaces of Civil War remembrance

at the Cotton Sates. Atlanta did not set apart official space for the celebration of the Confederacy

and Lost Cause. Memory of the Civil War was an afterthought. Exposition organizers originally

declined the request by the Daughters of the Confederacy to put together an exhibit of

Confederate relics and it was only in September, at the start of the fair, that the DOC was able to

procure a small space to erect a structure to house exhibits provided by the organization and the

Sons of Confederate Veterans. Perhaps as the first exposition after Chicago and given the

tenuous economic climate, the fair’s organizers did not want to risk appearing partisan and

stirring sectional rivalries by having an explicit celebration of the Confederacy. Mrs. Joseph

Smith, President of the Woman’s Board for the fair claimed that the few relics gathered were a

celebration of those “whose valor and devotion, though to a lost cause, will never die.” At the

same time, she was willing to concede that they were an example of the “common glory of this

now united county [that] will forever illumine the pages of its history.”78 While women at the

expositions played a much more public role through the Woman’s Building, their part in

maintaining Confederate memory, especially at the Cotton States exposition, was essential.

Southern white women had much to gain by supporting southern white men. Their

superiority over black women in the antebellum period was maintained by slavery. With

77 L. W. B., “Atlanta’s Magic City” Chicago Inter Ocean, September 29, 1895, p. 24.

78 “Relics in Atlanta Exposition” Confederate Veteran (September 1895), 282; Cotton States and International Exposition and South, Illustrated, 97.

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emancipation the basis for their position in the social hierarchy was weakened. As a result,

southern white women’s memorialization of the Civil War was almost immediately “dedicated to

the reconstruction of southern white men.”79 Forming Ladies Memorial Associations, southern

women took it upon themselves to maintain the memory and virtue of southern manliness before

and during the war. As LeeAnn Whites argues in her study of gender in the New South,

“[southern men] turned to their women and children to validate them, to create out of their own

continued subordination the basis for their reconstruction as honorable men, even in the face of

their defeat in relation northern men and the southern freedpeople.”80 It is unsurprising, then, that

in Atlanta southern women took up the task of presenting historical collection of Civil War

artifacts. At both fairs, the Ladies Memorial Association and the United Daughters of the

Confederacy worked with their male counterparts to perpetuate the “noble” and “manly

qualities” of Confederate veterans. While Atlanta’s civic leaders were tentative in their

celebration of the Confederacy, the region’s women closed the gap to secure their position as

essential members of the region’s elite.

The Tennessee Centennial Exposition was the first World’s Fair to have a separate

history building. The building was an exact replica of the Erechtheum, the Parthenon’s neighbor

on the Acropolis. In charge of the History Department was G. P. Thruston, a Union Army

general who remained in the South following the war. Described as a “college-bred man, a man

of means, a lover of art, a collector of antiquities, a student of history,” he was well equipped to

head the department. Working alongside curator Robert T. Quarles, Corresponding Secretary of

the Tennessee Historical Society, the two men filled the building with objects relating to the

79 LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 86.

80 Whites, Gender Matters, 90.

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history of the United States. Glass cases arranged systematically told the history of America

from the colonial period to the present day with an emphasis on the role of Tennessee.

Everything from portraits of significant Americans and Tennesseans to maps and letters to guns

and swords were displayed. Among the displays of weaponry could be found Daniel Boone’s

flintlock musket and the pistol used by Andrew Jackson in his 1806 duel with the attorney

Charles Dickinson. The building also contained objects from all of the United States’ wars,

archeological collections from the American West, including Indian relics, and antiquities from

Mexico, Central and South America, and Asia. The building featured a subversive element with

two portraits of abolitionists William Wilberforce and the Earl of Shaftesbury provided by Fisk

University. The exposition also continued to deny the coevality of contemporary Native

Americans by featuring “[m]odern Indian trappings and objects, implements, pipes, and dress”

in the History Building. While no one seemed to expect the building to do well, it proved to be

one of the more popular features of the exposition and “visitors were constantly surprised at its

extent, value, and attractiveness.” This, no doubt, had to do with its most significant feature, a

large-scale exhibit of Confederate history.81

The Confederate exhibit was arranged by the Confederate Memorial Association and was

located in the north-wing of the building. It featured contributions from the United Confederate

Veterans, Daughters of the Confederacy, and Sons of Confederate Veterans. Justi claimed that it

was “probably the most valuable and important collection of relics and mementoes of the late

war that has been placed upon exhibition in the South.” The exhibit was comprehensive and

featured cases full of “all the paraphernalia of war,” while the walls were covered with portrait

and flags. It also contained some objects that were simply bizarre such as the hoof of the horse

81 Emphasis mine. Justi, Official History, 130-132, 137.

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shot out from under General Forrest during Colonel Straight’s raid through northern Alabama.82

Miss Hager, an “intelligent custodian,” was frequently present and offered information to the

curious visitor. Despite its celebration of the Confederacy, the exhibit had a soothing affect on

old animosities. “Many an old Confederate lingered lovingly over the cases, and many an eye

was full and heart was sore at the sight of the old familiar trappings and torn banners and sad

mementoes,” wrote Justi. “Visitors from the North could plainly see how near and dear to the

hearts of the South were these old relics. Yet there was a bright side to this exhibit, too. The days

of peace had come, and comrades in arms long separated were exchanging cheery and fraternal

greetings. To most of them the war was but an historic memory.” Visitors could also visit an

exhibit of the Grand Army of the Republic in the building’s south-wing. While smaller, the

exhibit featured a prominent badge of the Order accompanied by portraits of Grant, Sherman,

Thomas, and President McKinley. There was also a collection of muskets and bayonets and a

case filled with memorials of the “Federal side.”83

Whereas Civil War reunions presented a living memory of the sectional conflict, the

Centennial’s History Building contained them in an ordered environment. Divorced from their

living or past owners these objects were open to all as a common heritage. Whether northern or

southern, to the visitor the historical relics of the war were inert cultural artifacts whose

meanings were open to interpretation. Literally enclosed, they memorialized the war, its causes,

and aftereffects. The emancipationist vision of the war, while present in the Fisk portraits, was

condemned to the past and the realm of sentimentality and nostalgia, allowing for reconciliation

between the nation’s whites.

82 A complete list of relics at the exposition can be found in the pages of the Confederate Veteran (August 1897), 561-564.

83 Justi, Official History, 133-134, 137.

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There were two other places of Civil War memory at the Centennial. Both were located

outside the main exposition space in the ephemeral world of Vanity Fair and were connected to

the growing commercialization of the war. Next to the Moorish Palace were the supposed

childhood cabins of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Lincoln and Davis were born in the

same county of Kentucky and entrepreneur A. W. Dennett of New York had recently purchased

the Lincoln homestead. Coordinating with the owner of the Davis’ cabin, Dennett had the homes

meticulously deconstructed and reconstructed on the exposition grounds. The Official Catalogue

was sure that no fairgoer would want to “miss seeing where the two men lived in their childhood,

who afterwards became the opposing heads of the opposing nations struggling for supremacy.”84

Many fairgoers, however, took the cabins to be humbug and avoided them.85

Unlike the Lincoln and Davis cabins, the cyclorama depicting the battle of Gettysburg

was immensely popular. Illustrating the third day of the battle and General Pickett’s disastrous

charge, the work required sixteen month’s labor by thirteen artists using seven tons of paint. The

cyclorama presented voyeuristic opportunity for the men and women who did not live through

the horrendous battle to experience it in vivid color. The Official Catalogue called it an “awful

grandeur” that “has a fascination for the beholder that is almost terrible,” while Justi recalled that

the “effect of the painting on the spectator is thrilling.” Contemplating the “thousands of heroes”

who “lie in bloody heaps scattered over the open field through which they had charged,” visitors

experienced the horror of conflict. At the same time, there was a celebratory nature to the

entertainment and fairgoers were encouraged to “see this wonderful battle scene.” Lacking their

own great conflict, late nineteenth century Americans looked to the past to view depictions of the

84 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial, 183.

85 Justi writes, “The genuineness of the cabins was well attested, but like a great many other really good things, the element of doubt was strong enough to impair their drawing powers.” Justi, Official History, 210.

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ideal soldier and heroic death that they thought was lacking in their own society. Few, however,

were concerned with the old soldiers whose “weird fascination” with the painting “chained

[them] to the spot.”86

Oriented towards the future, New South expositions were also saturated in the past. In the

temporal disjunctures created by industrial-capitalism, moderns found meaning in the

manufactured stability of a mythic past. As exhibited by the Atlanta and Nashville fairs, this past

included both ancient and recent history. Despite analogies to a Greco-Roman tradition, it was

the region’s memory of the Civil War and battles over Reconstruction that ultimately shaped the

representation of the past at the expositions. The celebrations of the Confederacy found on the

fairgrounds were both sacred and mundane and reflected the ways in which the Lost Cause had,

by the 1890s, become a part of national mythology. If in the initial decades after the war, the

terror of the conflict and the changes wrought created both psychological and social unease, by

the end of the century, death and glory were celebrated together within the spaces of low culture.

Perhaps there is no better evidence of the ways in which Civil War memory became

integrated in national culture than the way in which at the Tennessee Centennial the Confederacy

became entertainment. While helping to make the Lost Cause a national narrative, the

expositions remade the mythology of the Civil War a political shibboleth. Confederate sentiment

now safely contained in glass boxes, paraded as ageing veterans, and located on the fair’s

midway, reunited North and South by making the Lost Cause a cultural artifact as opposed to a

political rallying point. Although the Lost Cause carried political significance to the First World

War, the seeds of its ebb in American political life were sown at the South’s international

expositions.

86 Official Catalogue of the Tennessee Centennial, 181; Justi, Official History, 213.

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The Cotton States and International Exposition and Tennessee Centennial Exposition

were sites in which “collected memory” was transformed into “collective memory.”87 The

collected memories of the fairs—the relics and the reunions—were given social and cultural

meaning that helped to formulate a collective memory specific to the late nineteenth century

South.88 This particular collective memory was rooted in the South’s ongoing process of

modernization in which temporal and spatial dislocations required a social memory of stability.

Loss was an essential structure of feeling in the formation of the South’s modernity.

Apprehensions over displacement rely, according to historian Peter Fritzsche, “on common

structures of temporality that [have] the effect of connecting purely to individual misfortunes to

larger social processes, thus inviting narration, reflection, and mutual recognition.”89 The

memory of the Civil War and mythology of the Lost Cause contributed to the “memory-nation”

of the nineteenth century, which “relied on national historical narratives to provide continuity

through identity.”90 What is most striking about the history of the memory of the Civil War is the

way in which the southern narrative of the war became the more celebrated. With northern press

attention and tens of thousands of northern visitors, the Atlanta and Nashville fairs were central

sites in this transformation of national memory. Fundamental to this new memory was the

87 Wul Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies” History and Theory 41:2 (May 2002): 188.

88 “Collective memory” has become a fraught typology in the historiography. However, at its basis, and how I perceive it, is its connection to the more traditional and perhaps more useful term of “myth.” Collective memory cannot be divorced from the society in which it is based and its accompanying catalog of signs and symbols. The social action of memory, then, creates a common sense regardless of the personal memories of the participants of the historical event that is remembered. On collective memory see Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, “Collective Memory – What Is It?” History and Memory 8:1 (Spring-Summer 1996): 30-50; Confino, Nation As a Local Metaphor; and Kansteiner, “Finding Meaning in Memory,” 179-197.

89 Fritzsche, “Specters of History,” 1616-1617.

90 Olick and Robbins, “Social Memory Studies,” 121.

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South’s reformulation as a modern space in the eyes of northerners. By the end of the Spanish-

American war and with the beginning of mass immigration and the start of African American

movement out of the South, northerners were more likely to accept the South’s Jim Crow

modernity as their own.

Central to the North’s adoption of a Jim Crow modernity was the Lost Cause. This myth,

combined with nostalgia for the equally mythic Old South, celebrated the past, provided a balm

to industrialization, and acted as a moral template for the future that was embraced not only by

the South but by the entire nation. The expositions presented a future nation reunited through

industrial and commercial modernity, while at the same time asserting a southern identity located

in the southern past. Civil War reunions and celebrations of the Confederacy ensured a site of

stability and meaning while the region went through the wrenching process of modernization.

Moreover, this mythology and its immense popularity served as a social framework as

northerners began to confront southern African American migration to the nation’s industrial

cities and simultaneously debated the future of the country’s new colonial subjects and

immigrants. In the words of the future president William McKinley at the Cotton States and

International Exposition: “We will have no fighting any more, except we fight for a higher and

better citizenship and a grander civilization for our common country.”91 The reunited nation at

the exposition was a Jim Crow nation, whose “fight” for better citizens and civilization was

distinctly white and male. African Americans and women, while not completely excluded, were

assigned inferior positions and supporting roles in this southern and national future. It would take

another fifty years, two world wars, and a grassroots civil and political awakening for Jim Crow

modernity to begin its slow and ongoing decline.

91 Cotton States Exposition and South, Illustrated, 113.

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Coda: A Dream or Nightmare?

“From the turbid Mississippi to the Atlantic, and from the Ohio to the Gulf, an industrial evolution, more mighty in its significance, more powerful in its influence than any the world has

ever known, is being wrought.” – Frank Presbrey, The Empire of the South, 1898.

As the South and nation entered the twentieth century New South boosters continued to

turn to international expositions to convince the nation the region was not the United State’s

benighted backwater. Ten years after the Tennessee Centennial Exposition southerners gathered

one more time to celebrate the New South and invite the world to witness the region’s progress.

The Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition held on the shores of Hampton Roads, a thirty-minute

streetcar ride from Norfolk, Virginia, was the last great southern exposition. In between

Nashville’s fair and Norfolk’s, the United States played host to the 1901 Pan-American

Exposition in Buffalo, New York, the 1901-1902 South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian

Exposition in Charleston, South Carolina, and the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St.

Louis, Missouri. Each of these fairs did little to change the scope of the nineteenth century

exposition established in Chicago and only the Louisiana Purchase Exposition matched the

World’s Columbian in terms of scale. At each of these fairs, progress, modernity, and industrial

development were celebrated alongside showings of civic and national pride complemented by

comparative object lessons rooted in anthropological artifacts and ethnological villages.

After the Nashville exposition the next opportunity to advertise the South’s embrace of

modernity was at the Inter-State and West Indian Exposition. Over the winter of 1901-1902

southerners assembled in Charleston to celebrate the New South and promote trade with Latin

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America and the Caribbean. Coming on the heels of Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, the

Charleston fair featured many of the same exhibits and amusements as the northern exposition

and aligned well with the previous expositions in Atlanta and Nashville. Taking place in a port

city in long economic decline, the Inter-State hoped to return Charleston to its past glory as an

important entrepôt of international trade and commerce. Coming five years after the Tennessee

Centennial it provides only a partial view of how Jim Crow modernity transformed the South in

the years after the expositions. For a more complete picture of the promises of the New South

embodied in the Atlanta and Nashville fairs we need to go another five years into the future to

Norfolk in 1907.1

If the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions suggested that the New South

dream of the future was imminent, the Jamestown Tercentennial on Hampton Roads indicated

that the South had a long ways to go. The Tercentennial captures each of the themes of this

dissertation and demonstrates the ways in which some southern dreams of the future were

fulfilled while others turned to nightmares. New South industrial progress, female and African

American participation, Civil War memory, and imperial designs once again came together in a

southern city’s great exposition.

The Jamestown Ter-centennial Exposition commemorated the founding of Jamestown in

1607. “[T]he prime purpose of the Ter-Centennial was to illustrate history, to inculcate

Frank Presbrey, “Finis,” The Empire of the South: Its Resources, Industries, and Resorts. [or] The Southland: An Exposition of the Present Resources and Development of the South (Washington, DC, 1898), [no page numbers].

1 On the Inter-State and West Indian exposition see Judy L. Larson, “Three Southern World’s Fairs: Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, 1895, Tennessee Centennial, Nashville, 1897, South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition, Charleston, 1901/2: Creating Regional Self-Portraits Through Expositions,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 1998; and Bruce G. Harvey, “World’s Fairs in a Southern Accent: Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, 1895-1902,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Vanderbilt University, 1998.

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patriotism and to show the value of education,” wrote exposition President Henry St. George

Tucker.2 The Tercentennial’s explicit emphasis on history and memory put it at odds with most

nineteenth century international expositions. While some world’s fairs like the 1876 Philadelphia

Centennial International Exhibition, the Tennessee Centennial, and the 1904 St. Louis Louisiana

Purchase Exposition were commemorative events, they all maintained the importance, if not

primacy, of industry, invention, and economic growth. For the Tercentennial organizers, industry

took a decidedly second place. “It was ever the design to produce a great historical and

educational exposition in direct contradistinction to a commercial enterprise,” wrote Tucker. The

fair was never intended to match the “industrial fairs of the past.”3 The Jamestown Tercentennial

gathered the nation in Virginia to celebrate the United States’ colonial founding. At the same

time and despite its organizers pretenses, the fair was a celebration of the New South and its

industrial corollary. As much as history was a key component of the exposition, the fair could

not ignore industry and commerce. The fair’s official catalogue made clear that the exposition

was an “effort to show the progress made in art and science; in commerce and manufacture; in

transportation and trade” and that the Tercentennial was representative of “Progress standing

tiptoe upon the threshold of the future.”4 Like its counterparts and against its organizers’ desires

industry stood out as much as the commemoration of a national historical event.

Planning for the Tercentennial began early. In 1900 the Association for the Preservation

of Virginia Antiquities—a society made up mostly of women, who held all the officer

2 Harry St. George Tucker, “Introduction,” The Official Blue Book of the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition (Norfolk, 1909), 1.

3 Tucker, “Introduction,” 1.

4 Official Catalogue with Maps, Illustrations of Grounds and Exhibits: Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition (Norfolk, 1906), 22.

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positions—initiated the idea of celebrating the tercentennial.5 A committee was established and

by the end of the year the idea had gained support from members of both the Virginia State

House and the United States Congress.6 By 1901, Norfolk, Williamsburg, and to lesser extent,

Richmond, put together proposals for hosting the exposition. Recognizing that Richmond would

have the largest pull, the Joint Jamestown Exposition Committee was established in Norfolk and

united Tidewater cities against the state capital to vie for the fair. Despite a last ditch effort by

Richmond, a bill chartering the Jamestown Exposition Committee was passed in the Virginia

House in March 1902. The committee was required to raise one million dollars and to select a

suitable site on Hampton Roads by 1904. General Fitzhugh Lee, nephew of Robert E. Lee, was

elected President of the newly established exposition company and set out to secure federal

funding.7

From the beginning the exposition company faced financial travails related to raising

enough capital through stock subscriptions to meet Virginia’s demand of having one million

dollars on hand by 1904. The goal was reached but by 1905 the exposition company still lacked a

federal appropriation. Having given large appropriations for expositions in St. Louis and

Portland, Oregon, Congress was growing weary of supporting every city’s request for an

international exposition.8 And despite having President Theodore Roosevelt’s support, the House

Committee on expositions refused to support the fair.9 There was, however, support for the fair

5 Blue Book, 26.

6 Robert T. Taylor, “The Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition of 1907,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 65:2 (April 1957), 171.

7 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 174, 179.

8 Blue Book, 49.

9 Blue Book, 62.

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from the U.S. Navy. The central feature of the exposition company’s proposal was a great naval

display on Hampton Roads. After some prodding Congress did approve a Bill to fund a naval,

marine, and military celebration at the Tercentennial. Although the two hundred and fifty

thousand dollars approved was much less than the five million the company had asked for.10

In 1905 General Lee died of massive stroke on his return from a fundraising trip in New

England. Henry St. George Tucker, Dean of Law at Columbian now George Washington

University and President of the American Bar Association, took over the presidency and went to

work full force for the exposition company. Construction began in 1906 on the Hampton Roads

site but the company suffered from a chronic lack of capital and construction was frequently

delayed. Although receiving a federal appropriation in June of 1906, the exposition remained

short of money due to the federal grant being earmarked towards government buildings and two

massive piers that were to extend out into Hampton Roads with only a small amount available to

the exposition. By Christmas 1906, Tucker was keeping the exposition afloat with his own

funds.11

Construction on the exposition did not begin in full force until the winter months of 1907.

Labor shortages, a hard winter, and mismanagement by the exposition company meant that on

opening day, April 26, 1907, the fairgrounds were in shambles. The great piers, the key

architectural feature of the exposition, were completed only in September 1907. The exposition’s

two largest buildings, the Manufacturers-Liberal Arts and the Machinery-Transportation, were

finished in July.12 Although the exposition company secured the participation of twenty-two

states with appropriations totaling over a million dollars, the non-state buildings remained empty

10 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 184.

11 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 186-188.

12 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 189-190, 200.

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for much of the exposition. Disorganization and poor planning led to more exhibit space than

was needed, while the failure to construct a proper fireproof building led many private donors to

cancel or withdraw their exhibits.13 By June the national press was calling the fair the

“Jamestown Imposition.”14 One northern newspaper reported in July that the grounds looked

“like a back woods settlement suddenly sprouted with hideous, temporary barracks that are

called hotels.” The exposition space was described as chaotic: “There are no street pavements

here, and about the only real sidewalks you find are in about the plaza.” Fairgoers left the

exposition encased in mud. “Mud is the feature of this exposition,” reported the paper, “[it] sticks

alike to your shoes [and] clothing.”15 The fair ended ingloriously when in December the U.S.

District Court placed the exposition company into receivership and any hopes of restarting the

fair in the spring of 1908 to recoup the two million five hundred thousand dollars still owing

were dashed.16

If the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions had at times struggled with the

bottom line, the Jamestown Tercentennial was a complete financial disaster. While Atlanta and

Nashville proved the ways the South was a modern industrial space, the Tercentennial confirmed

to outsiders that the South struggled to become modern. The New South vision of earlier fairs

was lost in the chaos and disorder of the Jamestown exposition. The first mistake of the

exposition company was to buy rather than lease the fairgrounds and build permanent buildings

13 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 190-192; Blue Book, 514.

14 Taylor, 198.

15 W. S. Couch, “Show is Best at Long Range,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 9, 1907, p. 3.

16 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 207; Nancy C. Dickinson, “Postscripts Jamestown Exposition, 1907,” Naval Station Library, Special Services Department (Norfolk: U.S. Naval Station, 1957).

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with the idea to sell the grounds and buildings as development after the exposition closed.17

While not illogical, the decision was financially onerous and made it difficult for the exposition

to pay its debts with gate receipts. Procrastination combined with mismanagement by the

exposition company led to very public failures that confirmed southern stereotypes of laziness

and unruliness. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported back from the exposition that the fair stood

“for the old Dixie of brave, unpractical men and braver, beautiful women, of a happy, patriarchal

plantation life moving to the music of tinkling banjoes from the negro quarters, of a poetic

idealism that recklessly hurled itself to gallant destruction against the hard, stern steel of the

north.” According to the Plain Dealer, the Jamestown Tercentennial’s organizers were similar to

their mythic Old South antecedents, unfit for the demands of the age and destined to failure.

“They simply have failed to catch the knack of it, that is all,” the paper condescendingly

concluded.18 The New South vision of earlier fairs turned into a nightmare in which a southern

city invited the nation to witness its modernity and instead presented disorder and failure,

confirming the region as backward and benighted.

The Jamestown Tercentennial included a Negro Building to induce gate receipts as well

as maintain the white South’s position as foremost experts on African Americans. The Negro

Exhibit was once again led by prominent blacks who believed that accommodation to Jim Crow

was necessary to demonstrate the race’s progress. However, the Tercentennial’s Negro Building

was far more contentious than Atlanta and Nashville’s. The building reflected the split between

African American intellectuals and leaders now firmly divided between W. E. B. Du Bois’

Niagara Movement and Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee machine. Already Charleston’s Inter-

State and West Indian Exposition’s building had exposed fault lines within the southern black

17 Blue Book, 38.

18 Couch, “Long Range,” p. 3.

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leadership. The Negro Building at the Inter-State suggested that African Americans’ conceptual

place in the South’s future was fading. Although the building’s Chief was Booker T.

Washington, at the height of his national powers, it was given a place away from the main

exposition buildings. Located in a grove of live oaks the building was not a part of the future-

oriented exposition but instead in the “Nature” section of the fair.19 According to the fairgrounds,

blacks had regressed since the Tennessee Centennial. Likewise, a statue of African American

laborers replaced Atlanta’s statue of a muscular African American with broken chains. Although

the statuary had the support of Washington and the Negro Building executive it was met with

protests from Charleston’s black community. One member of the Negro Board suggested that the

protesters “wanted Mr. Lopez [the sculptor] to represent the Negro habited in a top hat and frock

coat.” And concluded “[that] the work of the artist represents the race as the artisan and the tiller

of Southern soil. This is what the Negro is.”20 In Charleston the Negro Building’s dream of the

future was becoming increasingly contentious within the southern black community.

The Tercentennial’s building was not a celebrated affair. Whereas the Cotton States and

Tennessee Centennial went out of their way to advertise the building as a showcase for the

South’s race relations, Jamestown’s executive made certain that everyone understood that the

federal government was “responsible for the conduct of the Negro Exhibit.”21 For southern

whites the building, like its predecessors, was indicative of the dramatic changes within the

African American population due to its interaction with white southerners. “No one interested in

the study of ethnology and the evolution of a race from a state of semi-barbarism to useful

citizenship could visit the Negro exhibit without being profoundly impressed,” remembered the

19 Harvey, “Southern Accent,” 331.

20 Quoted in Harvey, “Southern Accent,” 333.

21 Blue Book, 508.

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Tercentennial’s official history.22 Likewise, the exposition featured living objects lesson of

where blacks had progressed from. “An Old Time Negro Cabin” proved to be one of the fair’s

more popular amusements and made clear to fairgoers that “[l]ife among large numbers of the

Negro inhabitants of the South is very simple and primitive.”23

The differences between Norfolk and the Atlanta and Nashville expositions lay in the

success of Jim Crow modernity. By 1907 southern whites had solidified their economic,

political, and social control of the region. Federal support of segregation combined with northern

disinterest in the plight of blacks left the region’s race relations to southern whites. Unlike the

Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial, the Tercentennial was a fully segregated affair: blacks

reported poor treatment, were barred from many exhibits, and had to bring their own cutlery and

glasses if dining from the exposition’s restaurants. Moreover, the Virginia legislature passed Jim

Crow laws segregating streetcars and public waiting rooms in the weeks prior to the opening of

the exposition.24 Jim Crow became a curiosity to northerners visiting the exposition who sent

back approving reports of segregation. As African Americans began a slow trickle but eventual

torrent northward and as northerners grasped the racial implications of mass European migration,

the Tercentennial again proved southern expositions as an important advertisement for the power

of Jim Crow to reform and control modernity’s racial and ethnic dislocations. “A negro is

22 Blue Book, 675.

23 Scenes at the Jamestown Exposition: With Historic Site in Old Virginia (New York, 1907).

24 W. H. Turner, “Bad Exposition” Cleveland Gazette, July 20, 1897, p. 2; “That Jamestown, Va., Exposition!” Cleveland Gazette, August 31, 1907, p. 1; “The Jamestown Exposition $2,5000,000 Short on the Enterprise,” Chicago Broad Axe, December 7, 1907, p. 1. On segregation at the Tercentennial see Angela Hornsby-Gutting, Black Manhood and Community Building in North Carolina, 1900-1930 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 150; Mabel O. Wilson, Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (Berkley: University of California Press, 2012), 133.

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respected in the South,” reported the Trenton, New Jeresey Evening Times from the

Tercentennial, “if he knows and keeps his place. He must not mix up with a white man.”25

Historian Walter Weare correctly concludes that “Jamestown sounded the last hurrah for

the high symbolism of separate spheres and mutual progress.”26 The Tercentennial’s Negro

Building was sixty thousand square feet and designed in the colonial style by Tuskegee-trained

architect, professor, and Booker T. Washington son-in-law, William S. Pittman.27 The Negro

Development and Exposition Company (NDEC) led by Giles B. Jackson organized the

building.28 Jackson was a “fiercely loyal” former slave of the exposition’s first President,

General Fitzhugh Lee, and was appointed by Lee to his position as head of the NDEC.29

Chairman of the Negro Executive Committee was Thomas J. Calloway, who was in charge along

with W. E. B. Du Bois of the Negro exhibit that won a gold medal at the 1901 Paris Universelle

Exposition.30 For the black commissioners the building continued the task of demonstrating the

progress of African Americans since emancipation.31 Booker T. Washington at the fair’s Negro

25 Charles A. Leigh, “Trip to the Exposition Good as the Show Itself,” Trenton Evening Times, July 1, 1907, p. 2.

26 Walter B. Weare, “New Negroes for a New Century: Adaptability on Display,” The Adaptable South: Essays in Honor of George Brown Tindall, Elizabeth Jacoway, Dan T. Carter, Lester C. Lamon, & Robert C. McMath, Jr., eds (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 119.

27 Wilson, Negro Building, 129; “The Negro at Jamestown” Indianapolis The Freeman, February 23, 1907, p. 1.

28 Blue Book, 675.

29 Wilson, Negro Building, 128.

30 “The Jamestown Negro Exhibit” Washington Bee, March 16, 1907, p. 1. On the Du Bois run Negro Exhibit in Paris see David Levering Lewis and Deborah Willis, A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American Portraits of Progress (New York: Amistad / The Library of Congress, 2003).

31 Blue Book, 675; “The Jamestown Negro Exhibit” Washington Bee, March 16, 1907, p. 1.

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Day celebration wished “that every member of my race could come here and witness these

evidences of progress.” Washington was satisfied by the display of “clean, orderly, sober, [and]

industrious” African Americans. Lastly, for members of the southern black elite the Jamestown

Tercentennial was a poignant reminder of where and how far they had come. Washington

thought that it was “especially fitting…that since here [Jamestown] we entered slavery that on

the same spot we should show results of improvement in both slavery and in freedom.”32

Likewise, a much-celebrated tableau by Parisian-trained African American sculptress, Meta

Warrick, traced the progress of African Americans from “primitive” Africa to modern

civilization.33 The Jamestown Tercentennial’s Negro Building, then, like the buildings before it,

laid claimed to a modern civilization and universal progress that blacks were often denied.

However, unlike the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial, African American leaders

and intellectuals, North and South, were divided on whether to support the Jamestown Negro

Building and the fair’s Jim Crow modernity. Whereas W. E. B. Du Bois had initially supported

Booker T. Washington’s “Atlanta Compromise” speech in 1895, in 1907 he led a boycott along

with Dr. Nathan Mossell and Atlanta University of the Tercentennial.34 In addition to a broad

southern campaign against the Negro Building, black Bostonians protested the seventy-five

thousand dollar appropriation for the Massachusetts state exhibit.35 With the realities of Jim

32 “The Negro’s Gala Day” Washington Bee, August 10, 1907, p. 1.

33 Blue Book, 677. For an excellent analysis of Warrick’s tableaux at Jamestown see W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory” Journal of American History (March 2003): 1368-1400.

34 On Du Bois initial support for the “Atlanta Compromise” see Robert J. Norrell, Up From History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cambridge: The Belknap Press, 2009), 128. On the boycott see Weare, “New Negroes,” 120; Hornsby-Gutting, Black Manhood, 150; and Wilson, Negro Building, 133.

35 Wilson, Negro Building, 133.

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Crow fully sunk in, many southern African Americans rejected the accommodationist vision

presented by the Negro Buildings. “It was one thing to acknowledge Jim Crow in theory as a

backdrop for separate development,” notes Weare, “but it was another thing to suffer in practice

its daily insults as the ironic price to stage a production to improve race relations.”36

If the Tennessee Centennial Exposition’s Negro Building opened in the subdued world of

the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, the Jamestown Negro Building, opening a year after the 1906

Atlanta and Brownsville race riots, made clear that not only were African Americans excluded

from the white South’s vision of progress they were violently made to stay on their side of an

increasingly stringent colorline. In addition, divisions within national black leadership had

erupted. The publication of Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk in 1903 and the founding of the

Niagara Movement in 1905, offered African Americans a real alternative to Washington’s

Tuskegee machine and the accommodationist rhetoric of the Negro Buildings.37

The Jim Crow modernity of the Atlanta and Nashville fairs was a two—if lop—sided,

affair. Southern whites behind the expositions suggested that I. Garland Penn’s “better class” of

blacks might be able to join the South in its march towards industrial-modernity albeit in a

“separate but equal” sense. For the black elite, clergy, and bourgeois entrepreneurs behind the

buildings this seemed like a fair deal. Adopting the ideology of accommodationism they believed

in themselves as better than their fellow African Americans who labored in the South’s cities and

on the plantations of the rural hinterland. They were willing to accept, and maybe even support

Jim Crow, if it meant they were able to share in the fruits of modernity. At the same time, a

growing cadre of African Americans in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere were transforming

the definition of the New Negro. This new black identity was more confident in itself and

36 Weare, “New Negreos,” 121. See also Wilson, Negro Building, 134.

37 Weare, “New Negroes,” 118.

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challenged white proscriptions for black America. Ultimately, the black side of Jim Crow

modernity faded in the face of a new coalition of black artists, activists, and politicians, in the

urban North and South.38

If the Negro Building was present yet contentious, the Jamestown Tercentennial lacked a

Woman’s Building even though local women spearheaded the celebration. In 1907 southern

women no longer had a separate space to define domesticity. Instead they were confined to

designing and organizing historical exhibits. With no Woman’s Building to rally behind, the

local division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy organized the construction of an exact

replica of Beauvoir, the home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. This “fine southern

plantation home” served as the fair’s Woman’s Building. It demonstrated southern domesticity

and cooking “under the direction of a southern gentlewoman.”39 Southern women, then,

continued to operate independently through the realm of Confederate memory. The lack of

definitive Woman’s Building was likely the result of an ongoing shift in feminist politics away

from nineteenth century definitions of womanhood to a more strident feminist perspective.40 The

first decade of the twentieth century saw a waning of women’s clubs in the South as a more

contentious feminist politics emerged. With many barriers broken in the 1890s—women could

38 For a black alternative to Jim Crow modernity and the ways in the African Americans in the urban spaces of the North transformed the definition of New Negro see Davarian Baldwin, Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

39 Blue Book, 388.

40 On creating independence through public celebration of Confederate memory see LeeAnn Whites, Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 7-8, 96; and Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood, 1865-1895 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003). For the transformation in “feminist” politics see Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); and Nancy F. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)

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ride bicycles, attend coeducational colleges—the New Woman looked for integration rather than

segregation.41 At the same time, Beauvoir demonstrates the ways in which southern women

continued to reconcile progress with tradition, making the transformations of the New South

palatable.42 Whether it was the conservative nature of the Tercentennial, changes to definitions

of womanhood, or the patriotic nature of the exposition directing feminine attention to historical

memory, southern women lacked a significant voice at the Jamestown fair.

Although the New South vision of the exposition was muddled by the inability of

Norfolk’s leading citizens to put on an effective fair, it was clear at the Tercentennial that the

South was now the long hoped for launching point of a U.S. empire in the Caribbean and Latin

America. The Charleston Inter-State and West Indian exposition had re-emphasized the

connections between the South and the “American Mediterranean.”43 However, the Jamestown

Tercentennial provided the nation’s greatest showing of military force in peacetime. Between the

Tennessee Centennial and the Jamestown Tercentennial, the United States became a colonial

power. The 1898 Spanish-American War led the U.S. to imperial holdings in the Caribbean and

South Pacific. Although the 1899-1902 Philippine-American War had tried Americans’ patience

with overseas holdings, the United States, led by Theodore Roosevelt, was not reluctant to flex

41 Elna C. Green, Southern Strategies: Southern Women and the Woman Suffrage Question (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 12.; and Karen Blair, “The Limits of Sisterhood: The Woman’s Building in Seattle, 1908-1921,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 8:1 (1984), 45.

42 Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Religion, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890-1930 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2004), 205.

43 Matthew Pratt Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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its new world status and military might. The Tercentennial was a manifestation of Roosevelt’s

“speak softly and carry a big stick” foreign policy.44

From the beginning the Tercentennial was intimately connected with empire. Its first

President, General Fitzhugh Lee, had made a name for himself not only as a Confederate General

but as a Major General in the Spanish-American War and later served as the Military Governor

in Havana, Cuba.45 Like previous southern expositions the Jamestown fair made displays of the

commercial possibilities available in Latin America. The Washington, DC based International

Bureau of American Republics put together an exhibit, while Mexico, the Dominican Republic,

and Haiti made official exhibitions. The fair also hosted the Ambassador or Minister of every

American republic.46 The Tercentennial, then, highlighted the connections between the South

and the world. Its greatest connection to U.S. empire, however, was its display of military might

and colonized peoples.

Like the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the Jamestown Tercentennial featured a

“Philippine Reservation.” The anthropological amusement was to show “life as it is among the

civilized and Christianized Filipinos and also the rude life in huts of the less civilized natives at

work fashioning implements of war or domestic life.” The fair’s guide promised that

“[r]epresentatives of the War Department have been at work in the islands getting the material

and people…and the promise is made that it will be a better opportunity for studying the

Filipinos than did the exhibit at St. Louis.”47 Like its previous counterpart it offered Americans a

44 On Roosevelt’s “Big Stick” foreign policy see Karl Berman, Under the Big Stick: Nicaragua and the United States Since 1848 (Boston: South End Press, 1986), 137-138.

45 Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 179.

46 Blue Book, 419-424.

47 Laird and Lee’s Guide to Historic Virginia and the Jamestown Centennial (Chicago, 1907), 129.

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chance to witness newly acquired colonial people, while confirming the important role the U.S.

played in bringing them civilization. The fair also included a Puerto Rico display, again put

together by the War Department. The exhibit made clear the “methods of American instruction”

with comparisons between the “old Spanish and the native peon school” and the “new or modern

school erected and maintained by Americans.” Samples of work conducted by “natives” in these

new technical schools were also exhibited.48 Here the Negro Building’s promises of translating

the technical school model to empire proved effective. In Puerto Rico and elsewhere, colonial

inhabitants were transformed into co-participants in the reconstruction of their territory, while

denied the rights of citizenship.

The Jamestown Tercentennial was advertised as “a military, naval, marine and historic

exhibition.”49 Displays of military uniforms from the Philippines and Alaska demonstrated the

“wide territorial influence of our nation” in the world.50 The most sensational event, however,

was the huge naval gathering for the length of the exposition. The flotilla of fifty war vessels

carrying six to eight hundred men created a floating city on the waters of Hampton Roads.

Foreign ships from England, Germany, France, Japan, Italy, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, Austria,

Sweden, and Argentina joined thirty-six American warships on the bay.51 Not to be out done, just

outside the fairgrounds the U.S. Infantry, Cavalry, and Artillery made camp and drilled daily on

48 Blue Book, 420-421.

49 See! See! See! Guide to the Jamestown Exposition, Historic Virginia and Washington (Washington, DC, 1907), 4.

50 Scenes at the Jamestown Exposition: With Historic Sites in Old Virginia (New York, 1907).

51 Laird and Lee’s, 131-132; “Jamestown Exposition—The Colonial City by the Sea” Charlotte Daily Observer, August 20, 1907, p. 11.

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the exposition’s plaza, “Lee’s Parade.”52 The army and navy displays were the defining

spectacles of the exposition and confirmed the U.S. as an international power. James Hutton,

writing in The Billboard, concluded that the Jamestown exposition was ultimately an “Army and

Navy Review of a gigantic nature.”53 Unlike Atlanta and Nashville, which could only intimate

empire, the Jamestown Tercentennial opened to an imperial nation. The exposition confirmed

America’s new position as a global military power.54 With the nation reconciled through the

Spanish-American War, the U.S. South became the nation’s launching point for a new military

empire that spanned the “American Mediterranean.”55 Indeed, the one definitive result of the

Jamestown Tercentennial was that the U.S. Navy purchased the exposition grounds and the

current naval base in Norfolk established. The base played a key role in America’s military

efforts in the World Wars and continues as one of the country’s key navy yards.56

At the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions, Civil War memory and a

celebration of the manly Confederate soldier tied directly into a nation looking to expand its

borders through empire. For the Jamestown Tercentennial, an exposition with history as it raison

d’être, memory of the Civil War and the Colonial Period were intimately a part of the festival.

Northern obsession with the Old South, the myth of the Lost Cause, and Civil War had not

52 “Jamestown Exposition—The Colonial City by the Sea” Charlotte Daily Observer, August 20, 1907, p. 11.

53 James S. Hutton, “Jamestown Exposition” The Billboard 19:26 (June 29, 1907), 16.

54 Weare, “New Negroes,” 117.

55 Guterl, American Mediterranean. On reconciliation through the Spanish-American War see Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 172-181; Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2005), 234

56 Dickinson, “Jamestown Exposition”; Taylor, “Jamestown Tercentennial,” 208.

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lessened in the decade between the Tennessee Centennial and the Tercentennial. If the South’s

expositions of the 1890s had contributed to the nation’s reconciliation, the Norfolk exposition

opened to a nation that celebrated its recent history of civil strife conjointly.57

Like the Nashville fair, the Norfolk exposition’s History Building was filled with

Confederate relics provided by the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This, combined with

the replica of Beauvoir, placed Confederate pride and memory at the heart of the exposition.58

Whereas the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial were tentative in openly celebrating their

Confederate heritage, the Jamestown Tercentennial named its central plaza after the great

Confederate General Robert E. Lee.59 Confederate monuments as well as a replica of Fortress

Monroe, where Jefferson Davis was imprisoned, added to Jamestown’s celebration of

Confederate heritage. Beyond the exposition fairgrounds, northern fairgoers were encouraged to

tour the fair’s surrounding Civil War history. Guides provided instruction on where to go and

what to see.60 Historical tourism to the South rose in the first years of the twentieth century. The

fair’s combination of nostalgia for the Old South alongside evidence of progress and innovation

became a standard theme for southern companies selling the region and its products. One of the

exposition’s main sponsors, the Norfolk & Western Railroad, used similar images of the state’s

Colonial and Confederate heritage to attract northerners to Virginia in the opening decades of the

twentieth century.61

57 On the popular memory and culture of reconciliation see Nina Silber, Romance of Reunion; and Karen Cox, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

58 Blue Book, 387-388; Scenes at the Jamestown Exposition

59 Laird and Lee’s, 114.

60 Scenes at the Jamestown Exposition.

61 Cox, Dreaming of Dixie, 134-135.

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At the same time, the fair celebrated reconciliation. Robert E. Lee’s nephew, before his

untimely death, was the ultimate symbol of reconciliation. Having served both the Confederacy

and nation and now leading a national celebration of the United States’ founding in the South,

Fitzhugh Lee was reconciliation embodied. The fair itself could be interpreted as an act of

reconciliation. Just one hundred miles from the former Confederate capital was a national

celebration of a key moment in the nation’s history. At the Jamestown Tercentennial, Colonial

history combined with Confederate and Old South memory to buttress a new national history that

included the South’s culture and divergence from the nation. The Tidewater communities of

Hampton Roads invited Americans to participate in the memory of both the Confederacy and the

nation. The reconciliation dreamed of in the 1890s had arrived.

The Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition was both a reflection and a refraction of the

hopes and dreams of the Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions. It reflected New

South desires for a society based on the old in which industrial capital flooded the South, opened

foreign markets, and where a race hierarchy included blacks in the region’s progress and yet

separated them within that society. It reflected, in many ways, a taming of the New South spirit

of the 1880s and 1890s. For some southerners the pace of change was too much and the fair was

a reassertion of an older South. “The keynote of American life is progress—an excellent and

most powerful characteristic,” wrote Miss Hinton of the Tercentennial’s North Carolina exhibit,

“yet harm and ultimate ruin will surely follow in its trail unless safeguarded by conservatism. No

study engenders and promotes the cultivation of this check to vandalism as does History.”62 The

fair reflected a society where women fulfilled traditional roles and protected the region from the

62 Quoted in Catherine W. Bishir, “Landmarks of Power: Building a Southern Past in Raleigh and Wilmington, North Carolina, 1885-1915” in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, W. Fitzhugh Brundage, ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 163.

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dislocating effects of modernity. The clear imperial designs of the exposition and its

unproblematic celebration of Confederate memory, achieved the goals of Atlanta and Nashville.

Although tempered, the Tercentennial fulfilled many of the dreams of the future presented by the

Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial expositions.

For many, however, the refraction of their dreams in the exposition was disturbing. The

New South vision of an ordered and prosperous South came unhinged in Jamestown’s financial

disaster. The disorder of the fair confirmed northern stereotypes. Southern progressive women

were all but cut out from participating. For the southern African American elite and middle class,

their dreams of inclusion in the region’s progress albeit on the white South’s terms appeared a

dubious assertion. It was more and more clear that no matter how much they accommodated

southern whites, they would be viewed as inferior in southern society. For some, then, the

Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition still represented the New South dream of the future; for

others, it had become a nightmare.

Although a prominent Atlanta citizen could brag in 1907 that since the closing of

Atlanta’s Cotton States exposition the city’s “population has increased thirty-five per cent; her

banking capital has increased sixty per cent; her personal property has been multiplied by many

millions, and the city has become more than ever before the toast and the emblem of southern

enterprise and of southern prosperity.”63 The perspective of many Americans was that the South

continued to lag behind the nation. The Cotton States and Tennessee Centennial invited

northerners to come and witness a South in transformation and to catch a glimpse of its future.

Northern investment was the lynchpin for the economic revolution that they believed was

imminent in the region. While many northern visitors to the fairs were impressed by the 63 Quoted in Blue Book, 57.

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expositions’ displays of industrial and cultural modernity, late nineteenth century racial science

combined with observations of poor and rural southerners to convince northerners that not only

was the South economically and socially lagging but that its people may be evolutionarily

stunted. The economically mobile southern middle class and elite looked with dismay at their

cities’ African American and poor white neighborhoods and the undeveloped rural hinterland. As

much as they tried they could not release the South from its contradiction of a growing industrial

economy hindered by the social and economic ills associated with stagnation.64

The New York delegation to the Cotton States exposition recognized the disconnect

between the fair and region’s dream of the future and the reality of a benighted South. Taking the

language of anthropology, the delegation concluded that the “most interesting subjects for

observation and study” were southerners themselves, white and black. According to the New

Yorkers, African American and white southerners wandered “the ground in mute and open-

mouthed amazement.” The delegation hoped that Atlanta’s exposition would “loosen the bonds

of lethargy which have compressed [rural southerners’] faculties, and awaken new ideas and

ambition in their dormant brains.” The New Yorkers concluded that the Georgia “cracker” was

“by no means extinct.” Poor rural whites were not only “behind the times,” they were

evolutionarily stunted: “Morally he is sound, but his intellectual faculties are rusty from lack of

contact with the vitalizing and sharpening forces of modern civilization.” Perhaps, most

devastating for the fair’s New South boosters, the New Yorkers detected even in the more

“advanced,” cracker origins. While conceding that the better class of southerners had modern

64 On the ways in which the South—its culture, economy, and society—was viewed as a “problem” well into the twentieth century see Natalie J. Ring, The Problem South: Region, Empire, and the New Liberal State, 1880-1930 (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2012); Dewey W. Grantham, The South in Modern America: A Region at Odds (New York: Harper Collins, 1994); and Leigh Anne Duck, The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2006).

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accruements and some had even gone to Europe, they were all “unmistakably of ‘cracker’

origins, and their antecedents are disclosed in various mannerisms and peculiarities that are

plainly apparent despite the gloss of artifice and varnish of gentility that has been applied to the

surface of their manners and modes of speech.”65 As much as New South ideologues attempted

to demonstrate a modern South, outsiders were given the impression that the region lagged

behind.

The South has and in many ways continues to be viewed as the backward underside of

American modernity. Whether in the public health campaigns of the 1920s, the modernization

work of the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority, or the institutional and violent racism laid

bare by the televised nature of the Civil Rights Movement, the South appears to stand a part from

the rest of the nation. However, as the southerners who gathered at the Cotton States and

Tennessee Centennial exposition demonstrated, the South did not see itself as antithetical to the

nation’s modernity. Southerners accepted and articulated modernity on their own terms, often in

troubling ways. While southerners in the rural areas of the region reflected older and more

traditional values, the same was true for the rural areas of the North. Of course these supposedly

backward and premodern rural citizens frequently travelled to the modern spaces of city and

town to conduct business and socialize without much problem. The South, then, stood not so

much outside of American modernity in the late nineteenth century but within and alongside it.

The South’s Jim Crow modernity was a reflection of the region coming to terms with the

dislocations brought on by the massive transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries experienced across the globe. It was a modernity intimately connected with both the

local and global, the nation and empire. It was a modernity that placed race and the struggles of

65 New York at the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, GA (Albany, 1896), 275-278.

297

African Americans at its center. In some ways it resolved these tensions, in other ways it

exacerbated them. With the migration of blacks out of the South, Jim Crow modernity was seen

in the increasing ghettoization of African Americans in the North’s cities. Blacks, for their part,

abandoned their side of the equation and challenged Jim Crow modernity’s hold on the nation.

And it is the struggle against Jim Crow’s national implications that has its origins in the South’s

“solution” to the problem of modernity.66 It makes the South and its articulation of modernity a

central component of American modernity. The South’s dream of the future in the exposition

spaces of Atlanta and Nashville would, in the end, have national implications.

66 For the national nature of Jim Crow and the struggle against it to the present day see Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); and Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).

298

Figures

Figure I: World's Columbian Exposition's “White City.”

Francis Benjamin Johnston, “Palace of Mechanic Arts and Lagoon at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, Illinois,” 1892. Francis Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

299

Figure II: The Cotton States and International Exposition

“Looking South From Bell Tower,” 1895. Miscellaneous Items in High Demand. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

300

Figure III: Tennessee Centennial Exposition

Henderson Lithographic Co., “Tennessee Centennial Exposition, Nashville, Tennessee, 1897. Opens May 1st – Closes Oct. 31st / The Henderson Litho. Co., Cincinnati” (Cincinnati: The Henderson Litho. Co., 1896). Popular Graphic Arts. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

301

Figure IV: Tennessee Centennial at Night

Herman Justi, Official History of the Tennessee Centennial Exposition (Knoxville, 1898), 83.

302

Figure V: The Parthenon

B.L. Singley, “Tennessee Centennial, Nashville, Tenn., 1897: The Parthenon” (Meadville, Pa.: Keystone View Company, 1897). Stereograph Cards. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

303

Figure VI: The New South—The Triumph of Free Labor

Udo Keppler, “The New South – The Triumph of Free Labor” Puck 38: 972 (October 23, 1895), centerfold. Miscellaneous Items in High Demand, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC.

304

Figure VII: Cotton States Negro Building

“Negro Building.” Fred L. Howe 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition Photographs Collection. Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.

305

Figure VIII: Chains Broken Statue

“Negro Building (Interior).” Fred L. Howe 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition Photographs Collection. Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.

306

Figure IX: DC Exhibit

“Negro Building (Interior).” Fred L. Howe 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition Photographs Collection. Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.

307

Figure X: Centennial Negro Building

Calvert Bros. & Taylor, “Negro Building, Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition” (Nashville, 1897). THS 193. Box 13, Folder 6. Tennessee State Library and Archives.

308

Figure XI: Dahomey Village

“Dahomey Village.” Fred L. Howe 1895 Cotton States and International Exposition Photographs Collection. Kenan Research Center, Atlanta History Center.

309

Figure XII: Cotton States Woman’s Building

The Official Catalogue of the Cotton States and International Exposition Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.A. September 18 to December 31, 1895 (Atlanta, 1895).

310

Figure XIII: Centennial Woman’s Building

Calvert Bros. & Taylor, “Woman’s Building, Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition” (Nashville, 1897). THS 193. Box 13, Folder 6. Tennessee State Library and Archives.

311

Figure XIV: Unaccompanied Women

W. J. and A. J. Thuss, “The Main Entrance” Art Album of the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition (Nashville, 1898).

312

Figure XV: Sham Battle

Justi, Official History, 325.

313

Figure XVI: Chinese Village

Thuss, “Interior of the Chinese Village” Art Album of the Tennessee Centennial.

314

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